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The Demagogue 
and Lady Phayre 


By V--' 

William Ji Locke 

Author of 

“ At the Gate of Samaria” 


co 

[NOV 18 1895 


New York 

Edward Arnold 

70, Fifth Avenue 


I 


C o-f-u 


Copyright, 1895, 

By Edward Arnold. 


* 


SEntbersttg Press: 

John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U. S. A. 


Contents 


CHAP. PAGE 

I. THE ETERNAL FEMININE I 

II. A REVOLUTION 

III. THE END OF AN ACT 22 

IV. LADY PHAYRE AND THE COMING MAN .... 35 

V. LIZZIE 46 

VI. THE STARS IN THEIR COURSES 6l 

vii. a demagogue’s idyll 72 

VIII. WITH THE HELP OF LADY FHAYRE ..... 85 

IX. SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL MOMENTS 99 

X. LADY PHAY'RE THROWS HER CAP OVER THE WIND- 
MILLS 110 

XI. RECONSTRUCTION 122 

XII. A LEADER OF MEN 1 35 


XIII. THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER . . . 148 




. • 































































































































The D emagogue 
and 

Lady Phayre 

CHAPTER I 

THE ETERNAL FEMININE 

“ If yon are corning my way, Goddard, we may 
as well walk back together,” said the Member, 
putting on his fur-lined coat. 

Mr. Aloysius Gleam, member for Sunington, 
was a spare, precisely dressed little man on the 
hither side of forty. He was somewhat bald, and 
clean-shaven all to a tightly -sere wed fair mous- 
tache. A gold-rimmed eye-glass added a quaint 
air of alertness to a shrewd, sharp-featured face. 

Goddard acquiesced readily, although on this 
particular evening his road lay in a different 
direction. But democrat though he was, he felt 
flattered by Mr. Gleam’s friendly proposal. He 
was young — eight and twenty, a cabinetmaker by 
trade, self-taught and consequently self-opinion- 
ated, yet humble enough before evident superiority 
of knowledge or experience. Besides, in coming 
to take the chair at his lecture on The New Trades 


2 THE DEMAGOGUE A HD LADY PHAYRE 

Unionism, before the Sunington Radical Club, the 
Member had paid him a decided compliment. A 
member of Parliament has many pleasanter and 
more profitable ways of spending a precious spare 
evening during a busy session. 

They formed a singular contrast as they stood 
side by side in the little knot of committee-men 
who had remained behind after the audience had 
left. Goddard was above the middle height, 
squarely built, deep-chested, large-limbed ; his 
decent workman’s clothes hung loosely upon him. 
His features were dark and massive, chin and 
forehead square, nose somewhat fleshy, mouth 
shutting stubbornly with folds at the sides ; the 
lip, on which, like the rest of his face, no hair 
grew, rather long; altogether it was a powerful 
face, showing a nature capable of strong passions 
both for good and evil. The accident of straight 
black hair generally falling across his forehead, 
and a humorous setting of his eyes, relieved the 
face of harshness. At the present moment it was 
alive with the frankness of youth, and flushed 
with the success that had attended his lecture. 

The group walked slowly down the hall through 
the chairs, and lingered for a moment at the club- 
house door. It was a new quarter of London. 
Mr. Aloysius Gleam had lived in the neighbour- 
hood most of his life, and had seen it spring up 
from fields and market-gardens into a bustling 
town, with arteries fed from the life-stream of 
Oxford Street and the Strand. Its development 
had been dear to him. There was strong local 


THE ETERNAL FEMININE 


3 


feeling, and he was deservedly popular. It was 
therefore some time before he could break away 
from his supporters. At last he did so, and 
started with Goddard at a brisk pace up the 
High Street. 

“ I have been wondering, ” he said, after a 
short silence, “ whether you would care to take 
to politics seriously.” 

“ I hope you don’t think I ’m playing at it,” 
replied Goddard. 

“ Tut! don’t be so confoundedly touchy,” said 
Gleam good-humouredly. “ By ‘ seriously’ I 
meant entirely, professionally. Would you like 
to devote all your time to the work ? ” 

“ I should think I would, ” replied Goddard 
quickly ; “ hut I can ’t. I have my bread and butter 
to earn. I don’t quite see why you ask me. ” 

“ Would you accept a position if your bread 
and butter were assured to you ? ” 

“ As a paid agitator ? Oh no, thanks ! I 
could n’t stand that. Work of that sort must be 
given, not sold. ” 

“That’s rubbish,” said the Member lightly. 
“ The labourer is worthy of his hire. • The notion 
is as cranky as Tolstoi’s. ” 

“ It isn’t, ” said Goddard. “ The paid agitator 
is a fraud. He' pretends to be a working-man 
and he is n’t. When I address a crowd I can say, 
‘ I am one of yourselves, the real thing. I 
belong to the Amalgamated Union of Cabinet- 
makers, and earn my forty bob a week with the 
work of my hands. ’ Men listen to me, and 


4 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 


respect me. What I could not swallow would be 
for a fellow to get up and tell me, ‘ It ’s all very 
well for you to talk ; but you ’re paid for talking, 
and make a jolly good thing of it. Instead of 
helping the working-man, you are simply growing 
fat on the working-man’s hard-earned money.’ 
I ’ve heard that said to paid agitators myself. ” 

“ Well, who said 1 wanted you to become a 
paid agitator ? ” asked Gleam. “ I don’t want you 
to stand on a barrel and address people as 
‘fellow-sufferers. ’ You are a cut above that kind 
of thing. What I wanted to propose to you was 
work on our new National Progressive League. 
Of course, scores of men are giving their services ; 
but they are men of a certain amount of leisure. 
They can afford it. The working-man has no 
leisure to speak of, and we would give anything 
for the services of a few well-educated, clear- 
headed working-men like yourself. We could 
manage three pounds a week — perhaps more. 
Well, there ’s a chance for you. ” 

Goddard walked on a few steps in silence. He 
was young, earnest, a passionate champion of the 
great questions on the Progressive programme. 
He felt in himself a power to grip the atten- 
tion of men. He had dreamed vague dreams of 
personal ambition. Gleam’s offer was a great 
temptation. But the consciousness that it was a 
temptation made him adhere all the more obsti- 
nately to his principles. 

“ You are very kind,” he said at last, “ and I 
am flattered by your opinion of me. But I 


THE ETERNAL FEMININE 5 

shouldn’t feel justified in giving up my trade : it 
would n’t seem right. ” 

“ Well, do as you like, my good fellow, ” replied 
the Member cheerily. “ But I think you ’re a bit 
of an idiot. You ’ll find a thousand first-rate 
cabinetmakers for one competent politician. Any- 
how, if you change your mind — ” 

“I don’t like changing my mind,” returned 
Goddard, with a laugh, “ as if it were a shirt. ” 

“ We are none of us infallible, not even the 
youngest, ” quoted the Member below his breath. 

But, taking a broad view of youth, he forbore 
to rebuke the young man, and turned the conver- 
sation upon certain points in the recently deli- 
vered lecture. When he reached his turning he 
shook hands and disappeared. 

Goddard looked at his watch, and gave a little 
whistle of dismay. An omnibus from the west 
lumbered up. Goddard climbed on to the roof, 
and returned down the High Street. At the 
“ Golden Stag, * where the ’bus route ended, he 
descended, and proceeded almost at a run down 
some side streets and lanes, and eventually 
knocked at a door in a row of workmen’s 
cottages. 

“ Well, you are late, ” said a girl who opened 
the door to him. “ I ’ve been waiting with my ’at 
on for the last three-quarters of an hour. Ho; 
you ain’t going to kiss me. If you ’d wanted to 
do that, you ’d have found your way here before. ” 
“ I ’ve come as fast as I could, Lizzie, ” said the 
young man, somewhat out of breath. “ But I 


6 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

went back part of the way with Mr. Gleam, who 
wanted to speak to me. ” 

“ That ’s all very fine, ” said Lizzie. “ But I 
think I count for something. ” 

She led the way into a little front room, where 
a couple of girls were busy with dressmaking. 
One of them was bending over a sewing-machine. 
Bits of stuff and patterns littered the table. A 
few spotted fashion-plates adorned the walls. The 
air was heavy with the smell of new mercery. 

“ Here ’s Dan at last ! ” said Lizzie. “ It ’s only 
a case of how d’ ye do and good-bye. These are 
my two cousins. This one ’s Emily, and that ’s 
Sophie. Oh, look at the clock ! It is a shame ! ” 
Goddard shook hands with the two cousins of 
his affianced — pale, anemic girls, who giggled a 
little, while Lizzie saw to the straightness of her 
hat in the gilt mirror over the mantelpiece. When 
that was done, she admired herself for a moment. 
She was pretty — with the devil’s prettiness ; fluffy 
fair hair, a pink complexion and small, watery blue 
eyes — a poetic but discarded admirer had termed 
them “ liquid azure, ” which had pleased her 
mightily. Her mouth had a ripe way of pout- 
ing that took the edge off tart speeches, at any 
rate in a lover’s opinion, but otherwise it was 
loose and devoid of character. 

“ I can’t let him stop to talk,” she said, turning 
to her cousins. “ Father ’ll be in an awful stew. 
I ’ll bring him round another day. ” 

“ If he ’ll come, ” said Emily, the elder of the 
two. 


THE ETERNAL FEMININE 7 

“ Oh, of course I will, ” said Goddard. “ I ’m 
very pleased to make your acquaintance. ” 

He was feeling somewhat abashed amid these 
feminine surroundings, and laughed awkwardly. 
When the door closed behind Lizzie and himself 
he was relieved. 

“ I hope you are not vexed with me, Lizzie, ” 
he said humbly. “ I really did not know it was 
so late. ” 

“ It ’s no use talking about it, ” said Lizzie in 
an injured tone. “ But just let me keep you 
waiting, and see how you ’d like it. ” 

However, after a time, Lizzie was mollified, 
and in token thereof drew Daniel’s arm, correctly 
loverwise, within her own. 

“ The lecture was a great success, ” he said at 
length. “ Many more people than I had ex- 
pected. I wish you had been there. Only they 
don’t admit ladies. ” 

“ What was it about ? Politics, was n’t it ? " 

“ Yes — broadly speaking. Strictly it was on 
the New Trades Unionism. I traced its develop- 
ment, you know, showing how the spirit has 
changed. The Old Trades Unions were in- 
tensely jealous of State interference, because they 
looked upon the Government as the natural 
enemy of labour. But now labour is a power- 
ful element in the State, and means to legislate 
for itself, and so make State-control the very 
bulwark of its rights. Of course I went into 
all kinds of details, but that was the general 
run of it ” 


8 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PILAYRE 

“ It must have been awfully clever, ” said Lizzie, 
without much enthusiasm. 

“ Oh, I don’t know, ” laughed the young man. 
“ I was a little nervous at first. You see I have 
spoken often enough, both at the club and in the 
open air, and then the words come naturally. 
You get warmed up, you know, and you let them 
have it straight. But this is the first time I ’ve 
given a set lecture in cold blood, where every- 
thing has got to be expressed in chosen language 
— but it went very well. Mr. Gleam told me I 
was quite academic. ” 

“ He ’s a great swell, is n’t he ? ” asked Lizzie. 
“ Drives his carriage and pair, and lives in the 
big house with the griffins on the front gates. 
And you walked back with him ? ” 

“ Only to the top of the street, ” replied Goddard, 
still sounding an apologetic note. “ He wanted 
to ask me whether I would throw up the work- 
shop and become a paid agent of the National 
Progressive League. ” 

“ Oh, how nice ! ” said Lizzie. 

“ Yes, it was nice of him, ” replied Goddard ; 
“ but, of course, I declined. ” 

“ Oh, Daniel ! How could you ? It would have 
been so much more genteel. ” 

The word jarred upon him. It set the matter 
in a new light, and made it look very ugly. 
Besides, it afforded him a not very satisfactory 
peep into Lizzie’s spiritual horizon. 

“ You don’t mind my being a working-man, do 
you, Lizzie ? ” he asked, with some reproach. 


THE ETERNAL FEMININE 


9 


“ Oh, never mind. What ’s the odds ? We 
needn’t trouble about it. If you like to wear 
a dirty apron and have your ’ands all covered 
over with varnish and turpentine, I ’m sure I don’t 
care. ” 

She tossed her head, and drew a little away 
from him, so that only his fingers touched her 
arm. 

“ I don’t think we need discuss that, ” said 
Goddard stiffly — “ unless you think I am not 
good enough for you. In that case you might as 
well tell me at once. ” 

“ Now you ’re unkind, ” said Lizzie. 

They walked a few steps in silence, and then 
Lizzie pulled out a pocket-handkerchief and 
dabbed her eyes. The young man’s heart soft- 
ened miraculously. He slid back his arm beneath 
hers, and drew her a little closer. 

“ I didn’t mean to hurt you, Liz. Indeed, I 
did n’t. What can I do to say I ’m sorry ? ” 

“ You think I don’t care for you, ” whimpered 
Lizzie. “ Every one knows I gave up Joe Forster 
just for you ; and he ’s got his own tobacco busi- 
ness and keeps an assistant. ” 

The main part of which statement was not 
exactly in accordance with facts. But Goddard 
was not in the current of local gossip, and did 
not suspect his sweetheart’s veracity. 

“ Then you ’ll forgive me, and we ’ll make 
it up ? ” 

“ You don’t want to break it off? ” 

“ I ? Good gracious, no. Why, Liz ! ” 


10 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 


There was another pause. They were in the 
middle of the High Street. Knots of loafers 
hung around the blazing entrances of the public- 
houses, hut otherwise the pavement was more 
or less deserted. 

“ Why don’t you put your arm round my 
waist, then ? ” said Lizzie softly. 

Goddard did as he was bidden. She laughed 
out loud at his shy awkwardness, and pulled his 
fingers tighter round her figure. 

“ One ’d say I was the only girl you ’d ever 
walked out with. ” 

“ Well, you are, ” replied Goddard simply. “ I 
never bothered much with girls till I knew 
you. ” 

“ I believe that ’s a cracker,” said Lizzie, who 
was beginning to enjoy the walk. 

“ It is n’t, indeed. I swear it ’s true. ” 

“ Oh ! How can you ? Well, if it ’s true it 
oughtn’t to have been. You ought to have had 
some one to practise on, and then you would 
have learned to do things nicely. Practice makes 
perfect, you know. ” 

A light argument followed, which ended in 
Goddard’s discomfiture, and left him with a 
vague feeling that he had missed one of the 
duties of man in letting his talent for love- 
making lie dormant, and also an uneasy wonder 
at the extent of Lizzie’s familiarity with the 
subject. But Lizzie was quite happy. 

“You wouldn’t like any other girl, would 
you?” 


THE E TER HAL FEMININE 


1 1 


She rested her head slightly against him. The 
glare of an electric-lighted shop-front fell on her 
pretty, upturned face, and the young man forgot 
everything, save that she had soft puckered lips 
and young, even teeth. 

They were reconciled as far as harmony was 
ever possible between their natures. The rest of 
the walk home was undisturbed, and when they 
arrived at Lizzie’s door they were well pleased 
with each other. She opened the door with her 
latch-key and, holding it ajar, received his kiss 
prettily, and then with a desire to complete the 
reconciliation in all ways, said — 

“I’m glad you decided to remain a working- 
man, Dan. I can’t bear them silly politics. ” 

She disappeared quickly. Dan remained for a 
moment looking vaguely at the knocker, as if to 
address it in confidential remonstrance ; and then 
turning away, he let himself into the adjoining 
house, and slowly mounted the stairs to his room, 
with an all-pervading sense of the strange futility 
of the female mind. 


CHAPTER II 


A REVOLUTION 

She was the one thing feminine that had come 
across his path. He had stared at it like a new 
Adam. His original Eden lay at the back of the 
houses, and was divided by a low wall. Here, 
first, he used to lean, in his shirt-sleeves, pipe in 
mouth, on the late summer evenings, and exchange 
remarks with her as she removed the washing 
from the clothes’ lines, or idly took the air. How 
he had drifted into his present relations he would 
have found it difficult to determine. It never 
occurred to him to do so, his mind being filled 
with other things. 

By degrees he had familiarised himself with the 
fact of her existence. Then it seemed natural 
that he should marry her. In his social sphere a 
wife formed a necessary part of everyday exist- 
ence. And then she was the prettiest girl he had 
ever seen. When he kissed the pouting lips; all 
kinds of strange tinglings ran through him. That 
was proof positive of his being in love. So one 
day he called on her father, a retired captain of a 
Thames steamboat, and obtained his consent to 
the marriage. He was earning good wages, had 
even a little put by. The old man, whose tastes 


A REVOLUTION 


13 


were not of a domestic order, and who found a 
daughter an expensive luxury, got solemnly drunk 
all by himself to celebrate the occasion. Goddard 
considered him an abandoned old ruffian, as soon 
as he came to know more about him, and conceiv- 
ing a tender pity for Lizzie, longed to get her out 
of his clutches. 

It was hard work to carry on his trade, his self- 
education, his political pursuits, and his love- 
making, all at the same time. The last was 
distinctly pleasant, but it was sadly lacking in 
advantages from a utilitarian point of view. Until 
he had fallen in love with her over that back- 
garden wall, he had scouted the idea of “ messing 
about” with girls as a criminal waste of precious 
hours. Even now he felt somewhat guilty. He 
longed to be married, to settle down, to have 
Lizzie’s pretty face at his fireside definitely assured 
to him for the rest of his days, and to see before 
him a peaceful, undisturbed stretch of years where- 
in to further with all his heart and energies the 
great movement in which he was absorbed. 

Perhaps Lizzie was right. A little previous 
practice in the art of love would have been for his 
good ; but in a widely different sense from that 
which came within Lizzie’s philosophy. 

A few evenings after he had given the lecture 
at the Radical Club, he took her to the theatre. 
Some weeks previously he had treated her to the 
Lyceum, not doubting in the guilelessness of his 
heart that her aesthetic appreciation would be as 
great as his own. But she had been bored to 


14 the demagogue and lady phayre 


death, had come home cross, and the subject of 
play -going became a dangerous one. This time, 
however, by way of compensation, it was the 
Adelphi. Lizzie laughed and wept and squeezed 
Daniel’s arm, and enjoyed herself amazingly. She 
did not know with whom she was the more de- 
lighted, Mr. William Terriss or Daniel. On the 
top of the homeward ’bus she decided in favour of 
Daniel. She nestled close to him on the garden- 
seat, and brought his arm round her. Then she 
drew off her well-worn glove, so as to put her 
bare hand in his. He was touched, tightened his 
circling arm, and bent down his head till the fluffy 
fair curls brushed his lips. 

“ Why don’t you hug me oftener, Dan ? ” she 
murmured. “ Like this. It makes me feel much 
more homey with you. ” 

“ We are not always on top of a ’bus, ” said 
Dan. 

She gave him a little nudge to show him that 
she appreciated his jest, but she went on — 

“ I don ’t mind your kissing me, Dan. I like 
it. Now we ’re engaged you ought to be awfully 
spoony, you know, and squeeze me, and tell me 
how lovely I look, and all that. ” 

They were on the front seat of the ’bus; the 
people behind did not count as spectators; the 
hurrying roadway and crowded pavement below 
were remote as the clear-shining stars above. 
Daniel surrendered to the coaxing murmur, 
and kissed her a long lover’s kiss. When an 
inspector, a short time afterwards, demanded 


A REVOLUTION 15 

their tickets, Goddard forgot his Collectivist prin- 
ciples and became a fierce Individualist. 

“ What a confounded nuisance — these fellows 
disturbing us ! It ought n’t to be allowed,” he 
said, resettling himself. And Lizzie acquiesced. 

Towards the end of the journey they grew 
silent. Lizzie, tired, dozed with her head on his 
shoulder. A sudden jolt of the ’bus awakened 
her. She laughed, and rubbed her eyes. 

“ I do believe I ’ve been asleep. What have 
you been doing all the time ? ” 

“ Thinking,” he replied, smiling at the ques- 
tion. 

“ What of?” 

“ Well, I was thinking of my speech on Satur- 
day in Hyde Park, you know. There is an Eight 
Hour demonstration, and the League people have 
asked me to take a platform. I ’m becoming quite 
an important person, you see, Liz.” 

“ I thought you were going to say you’d been 
thinking of me,” said Lizzie, piqued. “ I call that 
beastly of you.” 

It took him all the time until they parted to 
re-establish the “ spoony ” relations that alone, 
according to Lizzie, seemed to make for happiness 
between them. 

But when he went to bed that night he found 
himself wondering for the first time whether his 
political interests might not cause serious friction 
between Lizzie and himself. To give them up 
was out of the question. Vague doubts came as 
to the wisdom of the step he was about to take. 


1 6 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

They troubled him, kept him from sleep for some 
hours. 

But before he could give the question fuller 
thought, new and undreamed-of conditions arose 
that changed the whole aspect of his life. 

It was a couple of days afterwards. He sat in 
a solicitor’s office staring at a little whiskered 
gentleman, whose even voice seemed to come from 
some other world. He had called in response to 
a letter, bringing with him the few documents he 
possessed — his dead mother’s marriage certificate, 
his own birth certificate, and his old indentures 
of apprenticeship. He had thought it a ques- 
tion of some trifling legacy on the part of the 
dead uncle whom he had never known, who had 
disowned his mother because she had brought 
disgrace on the family by marrying Sam Goddard 
the builder. He had conjectured that the hard old 
heart that had stonily refused succour to widowed 
sister had melted before his death, and had sought 
to make some little posthumous reparation to 
his sister’s son. Save that Robert Haig was a 
well-to-do hosier in Birmingham, Goddard knew 
nothing at all about him. But when the little 
whiskered man announced that this unknown 
uncle had died, wifeless, childless, and intestate, 
that he, Goddard, was the next-of-kin, and in- 
herited, not only the business as it stood, but a 
considerable sum of invested money, that brought 
in between four and five hundred a year, he 
stared, open-mouthed, in blank amazement, and 


A REVOLUTION \y 

it was some time before he could recover his 
bewildered faculties. 

“ Is there no one who has a better right to all 
this money than I ? ” he asked, after a while. 

“ Not a soul. Since the death of his wife and 
daughter the late Mr. Haig had neither kith nor 
kin besides yourself. ” 

“ How did you find my whereabouts ? ” 

It seemed to him as if he were living for the 
moment the irresponsible life of comic opera. 

“ Simplest thing in the world, ” replied the 
lawyer. “ Your mother’s letters were found 
docketed amongst Mr. Haig’s papers. The last 
one, appealing to him for help on the occasion of 
your father’s death, contained the address of the 
firm of cabinetmakers to whom you were inden- 
tured. They gave us your present address. ” 
Goddard rose from his chair, and made one or 
two turns about the room. 

“ It ’s difficult to realise it all at once, ” he said, 
stopping before the solicitor. “ But I think I 
have grasped it now. What would you advise me 
to do ? ” 

“ You had better go as soon as possible to 
Birmingham and see our principals, Messrs. 
Taylor & Blythe. We are only acting for 
them, you know. They will be able to go into 
fuller details with you, particularly in the matter 
of the hosiery business. ” 

“They’ll have to sell that,” said Goddard 
quickly. “ It would be a white elephant to 
me. ” 


2 


1 8 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

“ 1 should strongly dissuade you from parting 
with it, ” said the lawyer. “ It appears to he a 
going concern. You should keep it on. Work 
it up. You would soon get into the way of it. ” 

“ And turn hosier ? Oh no ! I ’m proud of 
my handicraft, and I would go on with it if 
there were any necessity. But to wear a long 
frock-coat, and sell collars and neckties behind a 
counter — I am afraid I wasn’t made for it. ” 

He laughed at the vision of himself. The 
lawyer smiled too. The dark, heavily-cut face, 
with its great forehead and bright clever eyes, 
giving its promise of strength and intellect, 
seemed fitted for more strenuous work than 
shrewd buying and polite selling of hosiery. 

“ Well, you ’ll think it over,” said the lawyer. 

“ Yes, ” said Goddard. “ It strikes me I have 
a deal of thinking to do the next few days. ” 

He got into a District train to return to the 
workshop, from which he had obtained a couple 
of hours’ leave of absence. The journey passed 
in a dream. The fortune that had befallen him 
seemed almost beyond his powers of realisation. 
The prospective changes in his life presented 
themselves before him in quick succession — the 
suggestion of one leading to the shock of another. 
His trade would be abandoned, unless he chose 
to continue it as a hobby. He need never do an 
hour’s work again as long as he lived. He could 
live in a comfortable house of his own, surround 
himself with books — an endless vista of shelf 
upon shelf quivered before his eyes. The pos- 


A REVOLUTION 


9 


session of such an income demanded changes in 
habits, food, raiment. It gave infinite leisure. 
And then a thought that had gradually been 
piercing through the cloud of his bewilderment 
broke out like a sun over his mind, causing his 
heart to leap in a thrilling delight, as a great 
life-work was revealed to him. He no longer 
need stand at the brink of the great struggle, 
lending a helping hand in all too few hours of 
leisure. He could plunge into the very midst, 
fight for the cause of the people with all his 
brain and heart and energies. His face flushed, 
and his breath came quickly. It was a chilly 
day, and a man seated opposite to him in the 
third-class carriage was surprised to see him wipe 
the perspiration from his forehead. 

And then there was Lizzie. He would tell her 
that evening. He pictured to himself the ecstatic 
wonder on her pretty face. But the greater pas- 
sion held him, and Lizzie’s face floated vaguely 
behind the flashing dreams of work and struggle 
and victories. 

At the workshop he sought his employer, but 
the latter was absent. Goddard took off his coat, 
put on his apron, rolled up his sleeves, and turned 
to the fitting of the writing-table on which he had 
been engaged that morning. The feeling that he 
was doing this familiar thing for the last time 
made it appear strangely unreal. His tool-bag 
seemed no longer to belong to him. He had 
given it, in his mind, to the young apprentice 
who was working at his side. He joined in the 


20 THE DEMAGOG HE AND LADY PHAYRE 


desultory chat and jesting of his companions with 
the ready good humour that had always made 
him popular among them ; but his brain throbbed 
with the effort of self-control. He worked 
steadily, with the deft, sure touch of the skilled 
craftsman. The pigeon-hole slides ran into the 
grooves without a hairbreadth deviation, the little 
secret panel ran in and out without the hitch that 
a grain of dust could have made. It was grati- 
fying to him to be able to put the finishing 
touches to a piece of work he had undertaken. 
When he had done, he passed his hand caress- 
ingly over the polished curves of the sliding 
cover. He was proud of his craft. It was a 
beautiful thing that had shaped itself under his 
touch. 

“If all the work I do in the future,” he 
thought, “ is as perfect of its kind as this, I 
need fear no rivals.” 

It was over. He had had a pleasant interview 
with his employer, had received the hearty con- 
gratulations of his mates, who, after the manner 
understanded of the British workman, drank to 
his health and prosperity at a neighbouring 
tavern. He had bidden farewell to the trade 
in which he had found so much honest happiness. 
Again the sense of unreality came over him. 
The change had come so suddenly, so unex- 
pectedly. That morning he had risen a poor 
artisan ; he would lie down that night the owner 
of fabulous wealth, which he w~as going to Bir- 


A REVOLUTION 


21 


mingham the next day to claim. In spite of the 
strong will that strove to repress extravagant 
fancies, and to put matters in a common-sense, 
practical light, his imagination slipped elusively 
from his control, and ran riot amid the courts 
and halls of airy palaces. 


CHAPTER III 


THE END OF AN ACT 

Mr., or, as he loved to be designated, Captain 
Jenkyns, had once followed the sea. But that 
was a long time ago. The serious part of his life 
had been spent on a Thames steamer. The outer 
man was nautical, and the carnal inner, as an in- 
veterate craving for fiery drink clearly proved ; but 
many years of fresh water seemed to have washed 
the true sailor’s kindly salt out of his nature. He 
was a thick-set, grizzled old man, with bibulous 
superannuation written on every wrinkle that 
mounted to his little red-rimmed eyes, and in 
every filament of the network of tiny red veins 
on his nose. 

He was sitting in the leathern arm-chair, with 
his back to the parlour window, drinking his tea 
out of a saucer. Goddard and Lizzie sat decor- 
ously at the tea-table. It was a ceremonious oc- 
casion, as the use of the parlour, the potted ham 
and seed-cake on the table, Captain Jenkyns ’s 
brass-buttoned coat, and the little blue ribbon 
round Lizzie’s neck, with the bow tied kittenishly 
under her ear, all combined to testify. Previously 
Goddard used to join the domestic circle in the 


THE END OF AN ACT 


23 


kitchen, but then he had never been to Birming- 
ham nor opened a banking account at the City 
Bank. That made all the difference. 

So far, conversation had not been animated. 
Goddard had conducted it practically alone, 
sketching his visit to Birmingham, which had 
terminated to his complete satisfaction. An offer 
for the shop and good-will was already under 
consideration. The solicitors had advanced him a 
good round sum for present needs. 

“ To keep a shop warn’t good enough for yer, 

I suppose,” Captain Jenkyns had remarked in 
his agreeable way. 

“ No,” Goddard had answered coldly — he did 
not love the captain. “ It was n’t. ” 

And then he had proceeded with his story. 
But the talk languished. Lizzie, never expansive 
in her father’s presence, was less so to-day than 
usual. Goddard’s sudden accession to wealth — 
riches beyond the dreams of Lizzie’s avarice — 
somewhat awed her, after the first excitement 
had passed. His cleverness, his personality, all 
in fact that differentiated him from Joe Forster 
the tobacconist and his class, had always put him 
a little beyond her reach ; but now that he was a 
rich man as well, she felt frightened and abashed. 
She offered him bread and butter timidly, and 
flushed scarlet when she awkwardly flooded his 
tea-cup. Then crumbs of cake went the wrong 
way, and she retired to the window to hide her 
discomfiture. 

“ And now you ’re a hindependent gentleman, ” 


24 THE demagogue and lady phayre 

said the old man after a pause, setting down his 
saucer. “ I suppose you won’t want to he thinking 
of marrying my gell. ” 

Goddard sprang to his feet. He had his own 
reasons for feeling stung to the quick. 

“ You have no right to say that, ” he cried hotly. 
“ What do you take me for ? ” 

The ex-captain made the motion of “ Ease her ! ” 
with his hand, and chuckled. 

“ Do you think I don’t know human natur’, 
when I ’ve seed boat-loads of it every day for sixty 
years ? ” 

“ Well, you don’t know my nature,” said Daniel. 
“ Lizzie, come here. We ’ll soon settle that 
matter. ” 

Lizzie turned from the window and advanced 
towards him, flushing uncomfortably. 

“ Damme! I don’t want you to marry her. I 
don’t care a tinker’s damn, ” said the old man with 
unreasonable heat, as Goddard met Lizzie and 
took her by the hand. “ I ain’t going down on 
my bended knees to ask you to marry her. ” 

“ Oh, father! don’t,” said Lizzie on the brink 
of tears. 

“ Never mind, ” said Goddard. “ I want to 
marry you, and I ’m going to marry you. I ’ll have 
the banns put up next Sunday. ” 

“ Why don’t you have a special license at 
once ? ” growled the Captain sarcastically. 

“ Because I know my own business best, ” said 
Goddard. 

“ Then I ’m blarsted if you ’ll have her at all ! ” 


THE END OF AN ACT 


25 


“ Don’t make a scene, father, ” Lizzie entreated. 
She tried to slip away, but Goddard’s arm tight- 
ened and restrained her. He looked with disgust 
on the ignoble old face that blinked in cantank- 
erous dignity. Save on the ground of pure ill- 
temper he could not understand his outburst. 
Lizzie had often told him of the awful rows she 
had had with her father about nothing at all. 
But Goddard was not the man to be bullied. 

“ Lizzie is over twenty-one, and I ’m going to 
marry her whether you are blasted or not, Cap- 
tain Jenkyns. You can take that from me. ” 

“ Then you ’re a er fool than I took you 

for,” replied the Captain, giving in beneath the 
young fellow’s strong gaze. “Marry in haste; 
repent at leisure. You want to make a lady of 
her. She ain’t going to be no lady. It ’s only 
going to set her off her ’ead. Think she ’s going 
to recognise her poor old father when she lives in 
a fine ’ouse and dressed in silks and satins ? Not 
a bit of it. I know human natur’, I tell yer. I 
brought her up to be an honest working-man’s 
wife. That ’s what she ’s fit for. So that she 
could give me a bit of dinner on Sundays. Now 
you ’re a going to take her away from her natural 
surroundings, what she was born in, and make 
her neither flesh, nor fowl, nor good red ’erring. 
Think I don’t know ? And you, with your ’igh- 
falutin’ idea about being too good to keep a shop, 
you ought to marry a duchess instead of a poor old 
sailor’s gell : that ’s what you ought to do. ” 

He produced a flat bottle of rum from his side 


2 6 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PH AY RE 


pocket, filled his half -emptied tea-cup with 
spirits, and drank the compound to console his 
poor old sailor’s paternal heart. 

Goddard, seeing that the storm was over, smiled 
at the mixture of shrewdness and selfishness in 
the old man’s speech. Certain home-truths made 
him wince a little ; but the prospect of Captain 
Jenkyns not finding a seat at his Sunday dinner- 
table did not present itself to him as in any way 
pathetic. 

“ Well, ” he said good-humouredly, “ I am 
not going to marry a duchess, hut a girl as sweet 
as one. Is n’t that true, Liz ? And so there ’s an 
end to the matter. I suppose I can count on 
you to give her away, Captain ? ” 

“ Yes, I’ll give her away. Jolly good riddance,” 
growled the old man. 

A short while afterwards he rose, filled his 
clay pipe with cavendish, which he ground fine 
between his hands, and excusing himself on the 
score of business, left the two young people to 
themselves. His destination, however, was a far- 
off river-side public, where he spent the rest of 
the evening with his cronies, and informed them, 
in speech that grew gradually more marked 
by thickness and profanity, of the approaching 
splendour of his daughter’s fortunes. 

“ Cheer up, Lizzie, ” said Goddard, as she began 
to clear away the tea-things in silence. “ We 
neither of us mind what he says. ” 

“ He makes me so ashamed, ” said Lizzie. “ I 
did n’t know where to look. He ’s been at it ever 


THE END OF AN ACT 


2 7 


since yon ’ve been away, saying as how you would 
want to back out ; and he made me quite miser- 
able, he did. * 

The baby-blue eyes filled with tears. Goddard 
consoled her as best he could. 

“ There, there, don’t cry,” he said, patting her 
shoulder with his great hand. “ The banns will be 
put up next Sunday, as I said ; and three weeks 
won’t be long, you know ; and then it will all be 
over, and we ’ll start fair. Leave those things 
alone for the present, and let us talk about it. ” 

So they sat, side by side, over the fire, and 
spoke of the near future. They would live in 
lodgings until they could find a house to suit 
them. They discussed the size of the house, its 
position, the furniture, the question of servants. 
They came nearer the present, and Goddard 
counted out into her hand six crisp bank-notes 
wherewith to buy her trousseau. Lizzie’s mind 
swam in ecstatic wonderment. 

“ All this — for me ? ” she whispered, awe- 
stricken. 

“ Yes, and as much more if you like. I 
am going to get a new rig out, so why shouldn’t 
you ? ” 

“ Oh, Dan, ” she broke out suddenly, throwing 
her arms round his neck, “ I didn’t quite know 
whether I loved you before — but I do now — 
Dan ! ” 

There followed an interlude, during which the 
future was left in abeyance. 

“ And I was wondering how I was going to get 


28 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 


a wedding-dress. Emmie and I have talked for 
hours over it. Won’t I get a beauty now ! White 
satin with a long, long train. I saw one yester- 
day in a fashion-plate — oh! just lovely.” 

“ I suppose you won’t feel married otherwise,” 
he said, with a quiet smile. And then, seeing a 
quick shadow of dismay on her face, he laughed 
and kissed her. “ You shall drive to the church 
in a coach and four, with the horses’ manes 
and tails all tied up with orange-blossoms, if 
you like. ” 

She saw he was jesting kindly, and joined in 
the laugh — hut perfunctorily. The wedding- 
dress was the ecstatic, enrapturing part of the 
ceremony. To jest upon it savoured of profanity. 

After a while Lizzie returned to the tea-things, 
and, aided by Daniel, washed them up in the 
kitchen. 

“ Only fancy ! I am going to have servants to 
do this for me ever afterwards, ” she said brightly. 

The possession of the trousseau money had 
strongly influenced the girl’s facile temperament. 
The changed fortune ceased to be shadowy and 
disquieting. It had assumed already a comfort- 
ing, concrete form. The overwhelming realisation 
of the potential finery that lay in those crisp 
notes had crushed any feelings of delicacy in 
accepting the gift. The first wondering delight 
and childlike impulse of gratitude to Goddard 
was succeeded by a new sense of personal import- 
ance. Her garments would be dazzling — the 
thought of them raised her to a height whence 


THE END OF AN ACT 29 

she could almost look down upon Daniel. She 
no longer felt shy or constrained. 

They returned to the parlour, a prim little 
room, with a pervading impression of horse-hair, 
crocheted antimacassars, woolly mats and wax- 
fruit, and again envisaged the future. Lizzie sat 
in her father’s arm-chair, her hands deliciously 
idle in her lap, her mind all transcendental mil- 
linery. Goddard rested his elbow on the table, 
pushed back his hair from his forehead, and 
looked at her gravely. 

“ It ’s not all going to be beer and skittles, you 
know, Liz, ” he said. “ Although I have chucked 
the working-man, I am going in for precious hard 
work all the same. ” 

“Why, whatever for, when you haven’t your 
living to get ? ” she asked in surprise. 

Like the apochryphal British workman, Lizzie 
hated work, and hated those that liked it. She 
saw no point in unnecessary labour. 

“ No,” said Goddard, his face lighting up with 
the impulse of reply. “ Not my own living to 
get, thank God, but I have to help others to get 
theirs. I may not be able to do much. But 
when a lot of men work together, every little 
effort of each tells. And I mean, too, to come 
to the front, Liz, for the nearer the front a man 
is, the bigger the things he can do. And the 
front means a big position in Parliament, and 
that ’s what I ’m going to try and get before I 
die. If I don’t, it won’t be for want of fighting. 
But it will be a long time coming, and will take 


30 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

me all I know. That ’s why I didn’t take over 
the shop in Birmingham. ” 

“ Oh, that ’s why ? ” said Lizzie, trying to look 
sympathetic. 

“Of course. You see it wasn’t because I 
suddenly became too big for my boots — but I 
wanted all my time to myself for this other work. 
I have made a fair start. I know something 
about the inner workings of things already, and 
I can get men to listen to me when I speak. So 
I am going to work like a nigger, Liz. ” 

She sat silent and plucked at her dress. It 
was very wonderful and clever of Daniel to talk 
about becoming a Member of Parliament, but 
she could not in the least see why it was necessary 
for him to work like a nigger. In her heart she 
regretted the hosier’s shop, but she was afraid 
to tell him so. She looked up at him and smiled, 
with the outside of her features as it were, after 
the manner of dutiful yet uninterested woman. 
Goddard, encouraged, continued to unfold his 
schemes. He was in intense earnest, and spoke 
to her, as he had never spoken before, of the 
burning questions of the day — the unequal 
struggle between labour and capital, the ini- 
quity of the living wage, the stupendous problem 
of the unemployed, the great reforms on whose 
behalf he felt summoned forth to fight. And 
as the passion grew upon him, his voice vibrated 
and his eyes glowed, and his words waxed elo- 
quent. He broke the bonds of his usual speech 
with her, partly through a need of expansion, 


THE END OF AN ACT 31 

partly through a half-conscious desire to awaken 
a little of the girl’s sympathy. 

When he had done, and a little pause had 
followed, she looked up from the puckering of 
her dress. 

“ That ’s all lovely, Dan, ” she said ; “ but what 
am I to do ? ” 

The question brought his thoughts down from 
the empyrsean like a gash in balloon. 

“ Well, there will be the house to look after,” 
he said, in an altered tone ; “ and then — well 
— there will be babies — and lots of things, ” he 
concluded lamely. 

“ Oh, I don’t like babies,” said Lizzie, with 
frank inconsequence. “ They always want such 
a lot of fussing after, and they ’re always squall- 
ing. I ’m sure I shall want to smack them. 
Nasty little things. ” 

He looked at her rather perplexedly. It was 
a delicate subject. She caught his glance and 
coloured. 

"You shouldn’t go saying such things,” she 
murmured, giggling in embarrassment — “ and 
we not married yet ! ” 

Then something seemed to catch him by the 
heart, a queer chilly grip, and tug it downwards. 
He blamed himself for having suggested the 
idea, although he had done so without shadowing 
thoughts. The innuendo jarred upon him — he 
could not tell why. 

“ I am sorry, ” he said gravely. 

There was a silence for some time. Goddard 


32 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 


idly turned over the leaves of a rickety album 
filled with faded photographs of stiff, staring 
people in the costume of the sixties. 

Lizzie lay back in her chair, and devised the 
white satin wedding-dress. At last she called 
to him softly. 

“Dan.” 

He turned, saw her reclining there, smiling at 
him. Her cheeks were so pink, her fair hair so 
bewilderingly soft and fluffy, her parted lips so 
fresh and inviting, her young figure so cleanly 
cut, in spite of the ill-fitting dress and cheap 
corsets beneath, her white throat set off by 
the coquettish blue ribbon so alluring, that the 
heart of the young man, who knew little of 
the ways and fascinations of women, threw off 
the cold grip in a great quick throb. 

“ You have n’t given me a kiss all the time, 
Dan, ” she said without stirring. 

Well, he rose and kissed her. 

And the next day he called on the vicar of 
the parish, and settled the question of the banns. 
It was over. He felt lighter. There is nothing 
that is more irksome to a strong-willed man than 
indecision, and Goddard had passed through a 
period of grave misgiving. 

On his way down the path to the vicarage 
gate, however, he met Mr. Aloysius Gleam just 
entering it. The Member let fall his gold-rimmed 
eye-glass in some surprise, as he greeted him. 

“ What, more miracles ? You in the house 
of Eimmon ? ” he exclaimed, for Goddard had 


THE END OF AN ACT 


33 

been a thorn in the vicar’s flesh for some time 
past. 

“ I ’m going to get married,” replied Goddard, 
by way of explanation. 

The Member drooped his shoulders and lowered 
the point of his stick in a helpless attitude, and 
looked at him with an air of dismay. “What 
are you doing it for? Just when you ought to 
be going round the country like a firebrand. 
Now you ’ll be a damp faggot. I know. Go 
back and tell the vicar you did n’t mean it. It 
was an elaborate ‘draw’ on your part.” 

Daniel stuck his hands in his pockets and 
laughed. 

“I feel inclined to answer you like Touch- 
stone,” he said. 

“ The deuce you do,” said Gleam. 

A quick glance passed between them, and a 
shade of annoyance came over Goddard’s dark 
face. The analogy perhaps was closer than he 
intended. The other might retort with the gibes 
of Jacques. 

“Of course it is n’t my business,” added Gleam 
in a deprecating tone. “ But it might have been 
better for you to have waited — considering the 
change in your fortune, and your scheme of life 
generally. Well, I suppose folks will marry. 
It is even within the bounds of possibility I may 
do it myself one of these days.” \ 

He put up his eye-glass and passed his fingers 
over his tight fair moustache, as if to prepare 
himself for the ordeal. 

3 


34 THE demagogue and lady phayre 

“ It won’t interfere with any of our plans, I 
can assure you,” said Goddard. 

“ That ’s right. Don’t let it, for goodness’ sake. 
But marriage is a function of two independent 
variables, as they say in the differential calculus 
— and a deuced tough function too. Anyhow, if 
you ’re bent upon it, I wish you luck.” 

They shook hands and parted. Goddard turned 
away slowly. 

The Member’s words sounded again the note 
of warning, the same note that had rung in 
those of the old man on the previous day, the 
same that had rung in his own ears. 

“But I should have been a knave to have 
done differently,” he thought to himself. “ There 
was only one alternative.” 

He had deliberately chosen the part of the 
fool. 

“ I am damned glad,” he said aloud, swinging 
his stick. “ I ’ll walk straight, now and ever 
afterwards, whatever happens.” 

Three weeks afterwards they were married, 
and Lizzie’s wedding-dress, to her trembling joy, 
was fully described in the Sunington Weekly 
Chronicle. 


CHAPTER IY 


LADY PHAYRE AND THE COMING MAN 

“ I wish something new would happen, ” said 
Lady Phayre. 

“ There is the session just begun, ” replied Mr. 
Aloysius Gleam, drawing his arm-chair an inch 
nearer the fire. “We can promise you many 
New Year novelties. ” 

“ Call you them novelties ? ” asked Lady 
Phayre. * They will he as old as — as the ante- 
penultimate barrel-organ tune. ” 

“ You want to go too fast. Great political 
reforms move slowly. ” 

“ Yes, that is true — deadeningly true. I think 
I read it once in a newspaper. ” 

Gleam laughed, and spread out his hands 
before the blaze. He was familiar with her mood 
— a mild spiritual unrest, induced by supreme 
bodily comfort and intellectual disturbance. He 
had the faculty of the aesthetic as well as ultra- 
democratic tendencies, and he appreciated the 
harmony between her mood and the dim after- 
noon hour with its gathering shadows in corners 
of the room. Her comfortable attitude, with 
one hand hanging over the arm of the chair; 
her costume, a dark fur-edged tea-gown; her 


3 6 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 


expression of wistful meditation — all betokened 
a relaxation of fibre trying to pamper itself into 
depression. So the Member laughed, and a smile 
played round his clean-shaven lips in the silence 
that followed. 

The politician within the esoteric revolutionary 
ring, who did not know Lady Phayre, was like 
a Positivist ignorant of Auguste Comte. The 
analogy halts, however. Lady Phayre was far 
from being an evangelist; she was not even an 
apostle. She had been left with the key of a 
pleasant situation, and, like a wise woman, she 
used it. Her enemies called her insincere. If 
the late Sir Ephraim, they said, had sat as a 
Conservative, and had formed the cartilage as 
it were of a brilliant wing of that party, Lady 
Phayre’ s flat would have become an audaciously 
unauthorised Primrose Habitation. But political 
opponents will say anything. 

Certainly she took no combative part in political 
warfare. Her functions were rather those of an 
etherealised vivandiere to the band. The mem- 
bers came exhausted into her drawing-room, 
where she revived them with pannikins of sym- 
pathy, and spread the delicate ointment of flattery 
over their bruises. Not but what she exposed 
herself in times of need to the dangers and 
fatigues of the campaign. She had risked typhoid 
in slums, and congestion of the lungs in draughty 
halls. She also kept bravely up with the march, 
picking her dainty way through prodigious quan- 
tities of speeches, pamphlets, and articles, both 


LADY PHAYRE AND THE COMING MAN 3 7 

in type and manuscript. Now and then she 
stumbled sorely. Bimetallism was a morass, and 
trade statistics stone fences. On these occasions 
she would cry out for a helping hand, preferably 
that of Aloysius Gleam ; after which she would 
survey herself with rueful introspection, and put 
to herself the question addressed to the immortal 
Scapin. 

Her mood of to-day followed one of these 
periodic rescuings. 

“Hendrick’s amendment is coming on this 
evening, ” said Aloysius Gleam at last. “ The 
audacity of it is novel enough. Come down. It 
will amuse you. Burnet has a lady’s ticket going 
a-begging. ” 

“ I have had enough of Hendrick for some 
time, ” replied Lady Pliayre. “ He took me down 
to dinner last night at the M‘ Kays’, and could 
talk of nothing else. I wish you could put some 
sense into him. ” 

“ I wish I could. But a Collectivist who has 
broken loose is running headlong to destruc- 
tion. ” 

“ That was what I told him. Push Collectivism 
to its logical conclusion, and we get Mr. Bellamy’s 
intolerable paradise. He got purple in the face, 
said he was nothing if not logical, insisted on the 
establishment of comparative values for different 
kinds of labour and products, and called me a 
reactionary because I asked him how the State 
was going to determine the number of mutton 
chops that would go to a sonnet. ” 


38 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

“ Is that phrase your own, Lady Phayre ? ” 
asked Gleam, pricking up his ears. 

“ No, ” she replied, with a little touch of 
audacity. “ I snapped it up as an unconsidered 
trifle out of a review article. ” 

“ Goddard’s, I think, on Extremism as applied 
to Practical Politics. ” 

“ You are an encyclopaedia, ” said Lady Phayre, 
laughing. “ You know everything. ” 

“ Did you like the article ? ” 

“ Immensely. I detached it from the review, 
and restitched it with blue ribbon to use as a 
text-hook. Without it I might have been led to 
destruction by Hendrick. ” 

“ Ah, my dear Lady Phayre — I shall not tell 
it in Gath ; but when are you going to have views 
of your own ? ” 

“ Views? Of course I have views,” said Lady 
Phayre, comfortably reversing the crossing of her 
feet, “ just like everybody else, only theirs are 
fixed and mine are — dissolving. It gives greater 
variety to life. But I think the Goddard view 
will be lasting. ” 

“ I shall tell him. He will be flattered. ” 

“ Oh, you know him ? ” 

“ Pretty intimately. I may say that I trained 
him — in the sporting, not the pedagogic sense. ” 
“ You never told me. Have you many more 
lights under your bushel ? ” 

“ A dazzling illumination of unsuspected 
virtues. But I did n’t do very much for God- 
dard except put him in the way of things; 


LADY PHAYRE AND THE COMING MAN 39 

and he would have come to the front right 
enough without me. He is the coming man of 
the younger school of Progressists. The anomaly 
of his generation — a hot reformer with luminous 
common-sense — a popular demagogue with an 
idea of proportion — an original thinker — a 
powerful, eloquent speaker. Look at the work 
he has done on the Council, the Progressive 
League — ramifications spreading all over the 
country with organised courses of lectures on 
civism, social economics, and what not. Decidedly 
the coming man. ” 

“ It does one good to see you enthusiastic, ” 
cried Lady Phayre with a laugh. “ Your criti- 
cisms are generally more bracing than genial. 
But why don’t I know Goddard? ” 

“ He surely has not sprung suddenly into your 
horizon ? ” 

“ Of course not. The newspapers — general 
talk — I know all about him that way. I meant, 
why don’t I know him personally ? ” 

There was a touch of reprimand in the “ why. ” 
Gleam was Lord Chamberlain in Ordinary to her 
ladyship. 

“ I was waiting until he got into the House at 
the next general election. You see, until seven 
years ago, when he came into some money that 
rendered him independent, he was a carpenter 
or something — no, cabinetmaker — and so, to be 
frank, I never thought of it. ” 

“ And you call yourself a Radical ! Well, 
whaL is the matter with him ? Does he wear 


40 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

corduroys tied up at the knees, and carry a red 
pocket-handkerchief in his hat ? ” 

“ Oh dear no ! ” exclaimed Gleam hastily. 
“ He is presentable. I told you of a little train- 
ing — ” 

“ Well, then, lose no time in bringing him, ” 
said Lady Phayre. “ He surely must have heard 
of me” 

She was proud of her position : somewhat 
jealous of it too. That a generation of Progres- 
sists should arise which knew not Lady Phayre 
was a dreadful contingency. She had a prescrip- 
tive right to the homage of the coming man of 
the wing. Besides, an ex-cabinetmaker whose 
views on social polity she had thought worth 
while to tie up with blue ribbon was a novelty. 

Aloysius Gleam took his leave. At the door 
he was summoned to pause. 

“ He won’t walk up and down the room and 
shake his finger at me, will he ? ” 

“ Like Fenton ? ” he laughed. “ No, you can 
reassure your nerves. By the way,” he cried 
suddenly, “ there is a large meeting at Stepney 
next week, Thursday, at which Goddard is going 
to speak, and I have promised to say something. 
Would you care to come ? ” 

“ I shall be delighted, ” said Lady Phayre. 
“ Then I can see for myself whether he is like 
Fenton. ” 

“ Oh, I can guarantee that, ” said Gleam, with 
a final word of adieu. 

She sank back in her chair relieved. Fenton 


LADY PHAYRE AND THE COMING MAN 4 1 

was an aggressive person, fond of hurling at her 
his theory of State education of babies as the 
sovereign panacea for the Weltschmerz. She 
was a practical woman ; and philosophical ideas, 
unless gracefully conveyed, rather bored her./ 
She could see no sense in their absolute use. A 
limitless volume of abstraction did not interest 
her so much as a cubic inch of solid fact. That 
was why she liked Aloysius Gleam. 

She meditated a little longer before the fire, 
then she switched on the electric light, rang for 
the curtains to be drawn, and re-read Daniel 
Goddard’s article until it was time to dress for 
dinner. 

It was not a new experience for Lady Phayre. 
She was familiar with platforms, and the sight of 
the pale, moving mass of human faces in front. 
She had listened to the speeches of many dema- 
gogues to the proletariat, and had found them 
singularly lacking in originality. Accordingly, 
it was with the air of an old campaigner that she 
settled herself down by the side of Aloysius 
Gleam, and surveyed the decorous occupants of 
the platform, and the noisy but enthusiastic 
audience of working men and women in the body 
of the hall. 

Proceedings had already commenced when 
they entered. The chairman was concluding his 
introductory speech. The courteous applause that 
followed his remarks suddenly grew into the 
thunder that comes from the heart. Goddard 


4i THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

was standing before the table, his massive dark 
face lit with pleasure at his welcome. He began 
to speak. His voice, rich and sonorous, rang out 
through the last dying cheers, and compelled 
willing attention. After a few moments he held 
the audience in his grasp. 

Lady Phayre bent forward and looked with 
interested curiosity at the speaker, whom she saw 
mostly in profile, at intervals, full-face, when he 
flashed round to the side benches. Her quick 
perception appreciated the mastery he had ob- 
tained over his hearers, their instant respon- 
siveness to his touch. She herself was gradu- 
ally drawn under the spell, felt herself but a 
chord of the instrument that responded to every 
shade of invective, irony, and promise. She 
was not unconscious of a certain unfamiliar 
sensuousness in this surrender of her indi- 
viduality. Perhaps feminine instincts that had 
long lain dormant were awakened. The sense 
of power in the man set working deep-hidden 
springs of sensation. A strain of the barbaric 
lingers even in so super-refined a product as 
Lady Phayre. When Goddard had finished 
speaking, she leaned back in her chair with a 
kind of sigh. 

“ That ’s the genuine article, is n’t it ? ” said 
Gleam, turning to her smilingly. 

She nodded, rested her glance thoughtfully 
upon him for a moment. He seemed so small, 
precise, uninspiring compared with the huge- 
limbed man with the leonine face and rolling 
voice who had just been swaying her. 


LADY PHAYRE AND THE COMING MAN 43 

“ He is a power among these people, ” she said 
below her breath. 

“ I deserve some credit, don’t I?” he remarked. 
He was proud of Goddard, honestly delighted at the 
impression his pupil had made upon Lady Phayre. 

The succeeding speeches, modest and formal, 
after Goddard’s magnetic harangue, were quickly 
over. After three cheers for Dan Goddard, the 
audience broke up. The occupants of the plat- 
form formed into little groups. Gleam drew 
Goddard from the largest of these. 

“ I want to present you to Lady Phayre, the 
Lady Superior of the League. ” 

And before the other could reply, he had taken 
him prisoner by the lappel of his coat, and 
brought him, in his brisk way, to where Lady 
Phayre was standing, and had gone through the 
formality of presentation. 

“ You have had a great success to-night, Mr. 
Goddard,” she said. 

“ It is easy to speak to an enthusiastic audience, ” 
said Goddard. “ You see we mean business, ” he 
added, addressing Gleam. * “ We ’ve done our share 
in agitation. It is for you people in the House 
now to carry the bill through. ” 

“ I ’ll undertake to see that they don’t halt by 
the way,” said Lady Phayre with bewitching 
authority. 

“ I wish you were in the House, Goddard, ” 
said Gleam. 

“ Get me a seat and I’ll come, ” he replied with 
a laugh. 


44 THE demagogue and lady phayre 


“ You ’ll have the Hough division offered you 
according to general whisper. ” 

“ Not under a miracle, ” said Goddard. “ The 
moderate element in the constituency is too 
strong. ” 

“ I heard they were going to run an Inde- 
pendent Labour candidate, ” interposed Lady 
Phayre. “ I know the neighbourhood pretty 
well. Some friends I often stay with live near 
Ecclesby, and I hear the local gossip through 
them. ” 

“ They would withdraw the Labour man and 
support Goddard, if he stood,” explained Gleam. 

But Goddard laughed deprecatingly and shook 
his head. 

“It is all in the clouds. Bepson has not 
resigned the seat yet. It is only a rumour that 
he intends doing so, and haste in the matter 
would be indecent. Anyhow,” he added, after 
a pause, to Lady Phayre, “ if you would tell Mr. 
Gleam any news you may get, you would he 
doing me a service. ” 

“ Why not come and get it first hand ? ” asked 
Lady Phayre sweetly. “ I should he most pleased 
to see you if you would call — 13 Queen’s Court 
Mansions — Tuesdays. ” 

“You are very kind,” said Goddard, bowing. 

“ I had better give you a card,” she said, taking 
one from an elaborate little memoranda -book ; 
“ then you won’t forget the address. ” 

They remained a while in desultory talk. Then 
Lady Phayre departed under Gleam’s escort, and 


LADY PHAYRE AND THE COMING MAN 45 

Goddard returned to the group that had been 
waiting for him. An eager discussion, prolonged 
until the party broke up in the street, swept away 
from Goddard’s mind every lingering impression 
of his first interview with Lady Phayre. 


CHAPTER V 


LIZZIE 

The National Progressive League, under whose 
auspices the meeting at Stepney had been held, 
had originated in the minds of certain members 
of the extreme Parliamentary left, the most active 
of whom were the late Sir Ephraim Phayre, the 
chief, and Mr. Aloysius Gleam, his henchman. 
Its primary object was to form a strong wing of 
the Liberal party, in which extremists, oppor- 
tunists, and the waverers on the edge of the 
Independent Labour Party might rally together 
around practical Collectivist principles. It sought 
to embrace academic Radicalism and the in- 
terests of the Labour Party in a broader scheme 
of imperial policy. 

When Goddard threw himself into the work of 
the League it had all the promise and vitality of 
youth. Centres were being rapidly established 
throughout the kingdom. Systems of lectures on 
social and political subjects were being organised. 
Meetings, conferences, and demonstrations were 
arranged under its auspices. Pamphlets were 
published from its headquarters in London, as 
well as a vigorously written journal. Besides 
thus working on its own account, the League 


LIZZIE 


47 


was gradually gathering influence enough to con- 
stitute itself a great agency. It sent speakers 
to political gatherings, and canvassers to Parlia- 
mentary and municipal elections. It gained the 
confidence of the great trades unions and opera- 
tives’ associations, and provided helpers in labour 
conflicts. It was in touch at all points with 
political life — a vast undertaking, offering an 
unlimited field for the energies of its supporters. 
Its Statistical Bureau alone was capable of almost 
infinite extension. 

It was with a thrilling sense of pride that 
Goddard found himself in the full stream of 
the new movement. Every day brought him 
an added sense of power and responsibility. To 
qualify himself for the tasks that devolved upon 
him, he read deeply and widely, setting himself 
resolutely to fill in the gaps of his self-education. 
He studied French, German, Latin, beginning 
the latter with mensa, like a child, and strove to 
train his taste and judgment by extending his 
acquaintance with pure literature. His vigorous 
intellect assimilated rapidly, both from books and 
men, and gradually, as the months passed into 
years, his views became clearer, his judgments 
more penetrating and his grasp more sure and 
far-reaching. 

The League work, and afterwards his election to 
a political club, brought him into frequent contact 
with Aloysius Gleam. The latter was anxious to 
keep in touch with Goddard, not only because 
he foresaw in him a valuable man for the party, 


48 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

but also because he took a keen personal interest 
in the young man’s career. He had all a shrewd, 
generous little man’s vanity in extending to a 
big man the patronage he felt would soon not 
be needed. To his friends he prophesied great 
things of Goddard. He introduced him to the 
chief shortly before Sir Ephraim’s death. 

“ It is courageous of you to tackle that power- 
ful-faced young giant,” said Sir Ephraim, laugh- 
ing. 

“ Yes, ” replied Gleam, “ I feel like a hen 
hatching an ostrich egg. ” 

And when the young ostrich stalked out of 
the shell, and in the course of time took up its 
position in the world as a superior bird, Aloysius 
Gleam looked on with undisguised satisfaction. 

Once, in the early days of Goddard’s affluence, 
Gleam interrupted a warm discussion. 

“ Why don’t you take elocution lessons ? ” 

“ I never thought of it, ” Goddard replied. “ I 
have no desire to become an elegant orator. ” 

“ It might be useful to you in your private 
speech,” said Gleam, looking at him in his 
shrewd way. Goddard frowned perplexedly. 
Then he understood and coloured slightly. 

“ I don’t want to pretend to be better than I 
am, ” he said. “ If my speech shows I belong 
to the people, so much the better. Ho one will 
think the worse of me. ” 

Gleam laid his hand kindly on the young 
democrat’s arm — they were walking up and down 
the lobby of the House — and broke out into an 


LIZZIE 49 

impetuous harangue. The young man’s argu- 
ment was easily demolished. 

The result was that in this, as in many other 
things, he took Gleam’s advice. He was no fool 
for angry pride to furnish him with cap and 
bells. He saw, when he came to consider the 
matter dispassionately, that though London Doric 
might be sweet in the ears of the proletariat, 
it grated on the finer susceptibilities of the 
House of Commons. Whereupon he set to work 
upon elocution with the tireless energy of a 
Demosthenes. 

So in seven years he had gained for himself 
an ever-growing reputation. The great reviews 
had opened their pages to him. The League 
intrusted him with responsible work. He was 
on the London County Council, and a seat in 
Parliament awaited him at no distant future. 

To please his wife, Daniel had not settled down 
in Sunington. He had bidden farewell reluc- 
tantly, for it meant the sundering of many ties, 
and the surrendering of many interests. But 
Lizzie had been insistent. Visions of domestic 
harmony disturbed by incursions of Captain 
Jenkyns in an advanced state of profanity had 
prompted earnest beseeching. Perhaps she was 
wise; for soon after her marriage the old re- 
probate, to the exceeding great scandal of the 
neighbourhood, took to himself a mistress-house- 
keeper in the shape of a flaunting, red-faced 
female of pugnacious instincts, who had retained 
possession of the house after his death. Their 


50 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

goings on, Emily and Sophie declared, had been 
something awful. 

Lizzie had been well out of it. Daniel would 
never have been able to hold up his head for 
the disgrace; whereat Daniel had smiled some- 
what sardonically. His skin was a little too 
tough, he said, for vicarious reprobation. 

But Lizzie had other and more private reasons 
for wishing to migrate. In the first flush of 
her dignity she had shrunk from the streets with 
which she had been too grossly familiar during 
her early girlhood. She had larked with the 
butcher’s hoy, played kiss in the ring with the 
greengrocer’s assistant, and kept very serious 
company with Joe Forster the tobacconist. Such 
daily reminiscences are apt to prove embarrass- 
ing. The translated Lizzie had felt out of her 
element in Sunington. So, to please her, 
Daniel had come into London and taken a house 
in Notting Hill, where they had remained during 
the seven years of their married life. 

It was late when Goddard stood before the 
familiar door, on his return from the Stepney 
meeting. An expression of impatience escaped 
his lips as he noticed a light in the basement ; 
otherwise, with the exception of the faintly 
illuminated fanlight, the house was in darkness. 
He let himself in with his latch-key, and walking 
the length of the dim passage, descended the 
kitchen stairs, groping his way. He opened the 
kitchen door softly, and found the housemaid 


LIZZIE 


51 


asleep, with her head on the deal table. Awakened 
by his presence, the girl started in some confusion. 
“ Why have n’t you gone to bed, Jane ? ” 

His tone was less one of reprimand than that 
of a man repeating a disagreeable formula. 

“ Mistress was very poorly to-night, sir, and 
I thought I had better sit up till you came. ” 

He nodded, looked at her sombrely from be- 
neath his eyebrows. 

“ Did you see her to bed comfortably ? ” 

“ Oh yes, sir. ” 

“ Has n’t Miss Jenkyns been here ? ” 

“ Ho, sir. Miss Sophie came for an hour this 
afternoon. ” 

“Very well,” said Goddard, turning on his 
heel. “ Go to bed now, there ’s a good girl. You 
must be tired. ” 

He went heavily up the stairs again, turned 
off the gas in the hall, and continued his ascent. 
On the first floor he paused, leaned his ear against 
the bedroom door, and listened. Satisfied with a 
sound of heavy breathing within, he mounted the 
next flight and lit the gas in his own study, 
stirred a blackening fire, and after warming his 
hands for a few seconds, sat down at his writing- 
table. 

It was a plainly furnished room, lined with 
books in sober bindings, sloping and falling, 
with great gaps, untidily, in the shelves. A great 
table, covered with a red baize cloth and piled 
with papers, pamphlets, and odd volumes, occu- 
pied the centre. An old arm-chair, its seat filled 


52 THE DEMAGOGUE A AW LADY PHAYRE 


with a set of blue books, was drawn up near the 
fire. The mantelpiece was hare, save for a few 
pipes and smoker’s odds and ends. Above was 
pinned a broad-sheet almanac issued by some 
Reform organisation. Nowhere appeared any 
attempt at adornment. 

Goddard sat in his round-backed wooden chair, 
opened a couple of letters that had come by the 
evening post, and then drummed with his fingers 
on the table in a preoccupied way. The setting 
of his face was too stern to express pain, and yet 
the deep vertical furrow between the brows and 
the tightly compressed lips indicated thoughts 
far removed from joyousness. At last he shook 
himself, brushed his hair from his forehead with 
a hasty gesture, and drawing a great breath, 
which ended like a sigh, separated some papers 
from the chaotic mass, and set to work on them, 
pen in hand. He worked for half-an-hour, only 
pausing to fill and light a pipe, and then with a 
yawn he rose and went through the communicat- 
ing door into the adjoining room. A camp bed- 
stead and the bare bedroom requisites were all 
that it contained. His seven years of affluence 
had brought him no sense of the minor luxuries 
of life. His personal tastes were as simple as 
when he lodged in the little top -floor back in the 
working folks’ street in Sunington. 

With his watch he drew from his waistcoat 
pocket the card he had received at Stepney : 
“ Lady Phayre, 15 Queen’s Court Mansions. ” He 
had forgotten her existence. He glanced at the 


LIZZIE 


53 


card rather contemptuously, tore it across, and 
threw it into the grate. Then he undressed and 
slept the sleep of the weary man. 

The next morning he began his breakfast 
alone, although the table was laid for two. As 
he ate, he ran through his correspondence, and 
jotted down notes in his pocket-book. He was a 
busy man, particularly occupied just now with 
heavy committee-work on the Council, and sundry 
organisation schemes connected with the League, 
and every moment was of value. 

Presently the door opened, and Lizzie entered. 
She did not meet his following glance, but came 
forward with sullen, downcast eyes and silently 
took her place at the table. The seven years had 
pressed upon her with the weight of fourteen. 
The devil had walked off with his own beauty. 
Although she was barely thirty, the plump fresh- 
ness of youth had gone. The pink cheeks had 
paled and grown flabby ; round contours had fallen 
into puffiness ; the pout of the soft lips had re- 
laxed into unlovely looseness of mouth marked 
by marring lines. A common, slatternly woman, 
with loose untidy hair and swollen eyelids, and 
dressed in a old morning wrapper, she was as 
unlike the rosebud bride of Sunington as the 
light is unlike the darkness ; and yet by the 
inexorable law of development she was the same 
woman. 

She poured herself out a cup of tea and broke 
some dry bread on her plate. Neither had spoken. 
Goddard’s brow darkened a little as he went on 


54 THE demagogue and lady phayre 

with his breakfast and his papers. She stole 
from time to time a shifting glance at him. The 
expression of absorbed interest on his dark face 
irritated her. The dead silence became unbear- 
able. Suddenly she thrust back her chair a few 
inches, and struck the table sharply with her 
fingers. 

“For God’s sake say something, can’t you? ” 
she cried half-hysterically. 

Goddard looked up gravely and laid down his 
pencil. 

“ What can I say to you, Lizzie ? ” 

“ Anything. Curse me, nag at me — anything ; 
only don’t sit there as if I was the scum of the 
earth and you God Almighty. ” 

“ Well, you have broken your promise once 
more. What else can I tell you? You can’t 
expect me to be pleased, and I see no good in 
cursing and nagging. So I hold my tongue. ” 

“ I wish I was dead, ” said Lizzie bitterly. 

Goddard shrugged his shoulders. He had done 
his best according to his lights, and he had failed. 
Sometimes his heart echoed her wish. 

“ You have only yourself to thank, ” he said. 

“ Have I ? I ’ve not got you to thank for any- 
thing. Oh dear, no! You know you hate me. 
You never did care for me. Even when we was 
first married you cared for your dirty old politics 
more than you did for me. Oh, why did*n’t I 
marry Joe Forster ? He has three big shops now, 
and can hold up his head as much as you can, 
for all you ’re a County Councillor and have your 


LIZZIE 


55 


name in the newspapers. And what good does 
that do to me I ’d like to know ? It ’s all your fault, 
every bit your fault, and you drive me to it ; you 
know you do, and you ’d be glad if I dropped 
down dead now. ” 

It was not a new story. Her words had no 
longer power to move him to anger. He accepted 
her grimly as a burden he had to hear through 
life. 

“ We made a mistake in marrying, Lizzie, ” he 
said. “ We both found it out long ago. I was 
not the sort of man you wanted, and perhaps I 
ought to have remained single. But I have done 
my duty by you honestly, and — so help me, God — 
I always shall. What is it you want that I do 
not try to give you ? ” 

Many and many a woman, when she has been 
asked that question, the helpless question across 
the league-sundering gulf, has answered, aloud 
or dumbly, in a great yearning : “ Love, a breath 
of passion, a touch of tenderness. ” But in Lizzie 
that craving had never been deeper than the 
bloom on her cheek, and with the bloom it had 
perished. There are natures too common for the 
need of love, which is an instinct upwards of the 
soul. Instead, she answered querulously : “ Why 
don’t you give me some money, and' let me live 
away, somewhere ? ” 

“ To do God knows what with yourself ? Not 
I, unless you would like this sort of thing. ” He 
took from among the circulars with which he 
was daily deluged a chance-sent prospectus of a 


5 6 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

Home, and put it before her. She glanced at it, 
and then crumpled it up fiercely, and threw it 
into the fire. 

“ If you ’re going to do that with me, you ’d 
better look sharp, I can tell you, ” she cried, 
trembling with sudden rage. “ How long have 
you been making that little plan ? ” 

“ It is no plan. You could only go in there 
of your own free will. My only plan is to shelter 
you here, and make life as happy for you as you 
will let me. ” 

Lizzie sniffed contemptuously. 

“ What did you send for that thing for ? ” 

“ It came quite by chance. ” 

“ That ’s a damn lie ! ” 

He bent forward, took her wrist, and looked 
at her sternly between the eyes, which lowered, 
abashed. 

“ You know I never tell lies, ” he said. “ I 
tell you that you shall never go to such a place 
unless you wish to. But you shall stay in my 
house. And listen to me. If this goes on much 
longer, I shall have to engage a special attendant 
to live here, who will watch you like a cat. It 
will be a disgrace for you that you can well spare 
yourself. So be warned, and turn over a new leaf. ” 

He rose, opened the morning paper, and 
skimmed through the news summary. Lizzie 
rubbed the wrist that he had held in an uncon- 
sciously tight grip, and then she began to whim- 
per. But her tears had lost their effect upon 
Daniel. They came with maudlin frequency. 


LIZZIE 


57 


At last she broke into a great spluttering sob. 

“ I have been miserable ever since little Jacky 
died. I wish I had died with him. ” 

The name of the child, dead three years before, 
touched the man’s heart. Of the two, perhaps 
he had felt the loss the more. Standing behjnd 
her, he laid a hand upon her shoulder, and said 
in a rough, tenderer tone — 

“ It was hard, my girl. But you are not the 
only one. Other women have been left desolate. ” 
“ And other women have wished they were 
dead. I expect most of ’em do. It ’s beastly 
to be a woman. ” 

“ Well, you can’t help that,” he said grimly, 
resuming his newspaper. “ You had better try 
and make the best of it. ” 

The servant entered with his boots, which she 
placed on the hearthrug. When he had laced 
them up he stamped them into ease and looked 
more cheerful. A man’s moral tone always under- 
goes a subtle change with the donning of the 
morning boot or the evening slipper. 

“ I shall be back for supper early this even- 
ing, ” he said, “ so you won’t be lonely. Now be 
a good girl. Do. ” 

She made no reply, although he had spoken 
kindly and forgivingly, and she knew from past 
experience that the subject of the last night’s 
slip would not be alluded to again. As soon as 
he had gone, she drew from her dressing-gown 
pocket a soiled penny novelette, and settled 
down to her idle morning by the fireside. In 


58 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

the afternoon Emily came, a weary, shrivelled 
woman, to remain with her for a few hours. For 
some time past Daniel had made the sisters a 
secret allowance, as compensation for loss of 
time in their dressmaking business, on the con- 
dition of their keeping Lizzie company. Society 
in the ordinary sense she had none. It was the 
loneliness and idleness that had crushed her. At 
first it had seemed a grand thing to wear pretty 
dresses, and keep her hands white, and give over 
all the work of the house to the servants. Now 
the habit of sloth was ingrained. She had no 
occupation, no interests. Even her girlish fond- 
ness for finery was gone. The costume that gave 
her least trouble to put on was the one she 
selected. Like the once free-swimming sea- 
anemone she had grown encrusted to her rock, 
stretching out lazy tentacles. When her cousin 
arrived she was still attired in the old dress- 
ing-gown and down-at-heel slippers she had 
thrust on as she got out of her bed. Emily, 
who was precise and businesslike, hurried her 
off with an indignation not staled by custom, 
to dress herself decently. During her toilet she 
made the usual confession to Emily with pleas 
in mitigation, and the usual indictment of Daniel. 
But Emily was not sympathetic. She banged 
in the drawer, where she had been arranging 
Lizzie’s slovenly kept under-linen, and pulled out 
another viciously. 

“ You should have married a man like father, ” 
she said. “ That ’s the sort of husband you should 


LIZZIE 


59 


have had, who would have pulled you out of 
bed by your hair and given you a good sound 
hiding. Daniel ’s thousands of miles too good 
for you. ” 

Lizzie turned round and faced her passionately, 
straining at the ends of her stay-lace. 

“ I wish sometimes he would beat me. There ! 
I ’ll make him do it one of these days. ” 

“ Dan ’s not the man to treat his wife like a 
dog.” 

“ No. He treats me like a tabby -cat — beneath 
his notice. He has always done it. I may be a 
silly fool, but it does n’t require much intellec’ 
to know when folks look upon you as the dirt 
beneath their feet. ” 

“ Well, the dirt ought to be grateful when a 
man like Daniel condescends to put his foot upon 
it, ” replied Emily with conviction. 

“ Why did n’t you marry him yourself ? ” said 
Lizzie witheringly. 

“ Elizabeth Goddard, you ’re no better than a 
fool,” returned Emily. “ And if you ’ve nothing 
pleasanter to say, I ’ll go back home. ” 

As on many previous occasions, the threat 
moved Lizzie to tears, then to reproaches, 
finally to entreaties and submission. When 
peace was made they went off on a shopping 
expedition to Kensington High Street, where 
Lizzie, to make amends, bought her cousin a 
bonnet, and interested herself in a discussed 
readjustment of trimming. But outside a news 
vendor’s Emily pointed with her umbrella to 


60 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

an item in the contents bill of a Eadical evening 
paper : “ Dan Goddard at Stepney — Enthusiastic 
Eeception. ” 

“ Oh yes, I see, ” said Lizzie petulantly. “ I 
suppose you think I ought to fall down and 
worship him when he comes back. ” 

Her ill-humour returned, and she regretted 
the bonnet — an additional grievance. 

“ If it was n’t for him I ’m blessed if I ’d ever 
come near you, ” said Emily in the discussion that 
followed. 

And so it happened that when Goddard came 
home he found his wife in a fit of sulks. The 
experiment of a domestic evening failed, as it 
had done so many times before. She replied 
monosyllabically to his attempts at conversation, 
refused point-blank his offer to put her into a 
cab and drive her to a theatre — a wild delight of 
past years — and retired to bed at nine o’clock. 

Goddard mounted to his own den, and plunged 
into his work with the zest of a man who has 
conscientiously acquitted himself of an irksome 
duty, and is free to apply himself without scruple 
to more congenial occupations. 


CHAPTER VI 


THE STARS IN THEIR COURSES 

It was the Tuesday luncheon-hour. The dining- 
room of the political club was thronged with 
hungry councillors from Spring Gardens, and 
politicians to whom the weekly meetings of the 
Council were a matter of concern. The air buzzed 
with eager talk. There was a continual going to 
and fro between the tables — greetings, hand- 
shakes, hurried conversations between lunchers 
and passers-by. Elation over an important 
measure successfully carried through was the 
prevailing tone, encouraging grandiose imagin- 
ings. London was to have its hanging-gardens, 
like Babylon of old, and the streams that water 
the New Jerusalem would take a lesson in limpid- 
ness from the Thames. 

Goddard sat at a table with three others, w T ho 
were thus forecasting the municipal millennium. 
He listened with a smile. Had he not just 
pricked the visionaries with kindly satire in his 
review article on Extremism ? 

“ And all ad major em L. C. C. gloriam , " said 
ha “ That way madness lies. ” 

There was an impatient laugh. 

“ You are a reactionary. ” 


62 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PLIAYRE 


“lama practical man, ” said Goddard. “ I don’t 
like confusing means with ends. Matthew Arnold 
was right in calling faith in machinery our beset- 
ting sin. We have beatified too many of our 
institutions already, and made them too much 
puffed up with conceit for work-a-day purposes. 
We are always in danger of drifting into the idea 
that the work exists for the glorification of the 
instrument. ” 

“ But what about our ideals ?” cried one. “ They 
are as necessary for the life of the party of progress, 
as the reverence for decayed antiquity is for that 
of the Tories. Man is a dreaming animal, and 
his dreams inspire his actions. ” 

“ Hence this crazy society, ” said Goddard, with 
a laugh. “ I understand now. But man has 
reason to direct his inspirations. Have your 
ideals by all means, but see they are true ones — 
that they can be attained without the sacrifice of 
minor commonplace reforms. Best to build up 
your ideal as you go along. * 

“ Synthetic socialism — a good title, ” mur- 
mured another, a journalist in the labour interest. 

“ Ezekiel has done it all before you, with his 
‘line upon line, precept upon precept, ’ ” remarked 
Goddard. “ They did know something down in 
Judee. But you ’ve begged the question as to 
the glorification of the County Council. You 
want to make London flow with milk and honey. 
Is that your real end ? Or is it to pose as a com- 
posite middle-class Jehovah? I think the latter. 
Ho. I believe in progress. I have given up my life 


THE STARS IN THEIR COURSES 63 

to the cause of it, and I will fight for it till the 
last breath in my body. But I will look upon 
myself and any institution to which I belong as 
the merest tool in the hands of social evolution. ” 
Here the discussion was interrupted by the 
waiter, whose temporary ideal was the perfec- 
tion of his guidance of Goddard in the matter of 
sweets. 

“ I will have another helping of beef, ” said 
Goddard. “ I am hungry. ” 

“ That accounts for your paradoxical humour, ” 
said the journalist. “ I have often noticed it. ” 
Goddard nodded and leant back in his chair. 
Just then he caught sight of Aloysius Gleam, the 
pink of neatness, with an orchid in the button- 
hole of his frock-coat, scanning the room through 
his eye-glass. When his glance met Goddard he 
came forward with the expression of a man who 
has found the object of his search. Pending the 
arrival of the beef, Goddard rose and advanced 
to meet him. 

“ I thought I should find you, ” said Gleam. 
“ I want to talk to you seriously. ” 

“ So do I, ” said Goddard. “ You ’re the very 
man I was longing for. Perhaps it ’s about the 
same matter. ” 

“ Perhaps, ” said Gleam, with a twinkle of 
amusement. “ You broach it. ” 

“ The rumour about Ecclesby. ” 

“ What rumour ? ” asked Gleam, becoming 
grave. 

“ The strike. There is a big storm brewing 


64 THE demagogue and lady phayre 

for the near future, I ’m afraid. Have n’t you 
heard ? ” 

“ Not a suggestion, ” returned Gleam. 

“ I had a report from Willaston — he is the 
League secretary there — forecasting probable 
events. Nothing is definite. I thought perhaps 
you might have heard. ” 

Gleam shook his head. 

“ What is wrong ? New machinery, and Trades 
Union and Employers’ Federation at loggerheads 
about it ? ” 

“ No. Not machinery. Worse than that. 
Sweating, out-work. Simple tyranny. Here is 
the letter. ” 

“ I don’t think much of it. It will blow over, ” 
said Gleam, having looked through the letter. 
“ Wait a bit though, ” he added, with a quick 
glance. “ Eccleshy is in the Hough division, is n’t 
it?” 

“ Of course, ” said Goddard. “ That ’s why 
Willaston wrote to me in particular. ” 

“ I ’ll keep a look-out, ” said Gleam. “ Cleaver 
and Elyte are the leading firm there. Oddly 
enough, I am connected with them in a round- 
about way in the City, through Eosenthal, you 
know. And then there are Flood & Sons in 
London. ” 

“ What an encyclopaedia you are ! ” said 
Goddard. 

Aloysius Gleam laughed, and curled his 
moustache. 

“ That reminds me of my mission, ” he said. 


THE STATS IN THEIR COURSES 65 

“ Why have n’t you called upon Lady Phayre ? ” 

Goddard disregarded the apparent non sequitur, 
and replied with an air of surprise — 

“ What have I to do in ladies’ drawing-rooms ? ” 

“ Sit, drink tea, and talk political gossip,” said 
Gleam. 

“ I was n’t brought up to it,” replied Goddard. 

“ I have never done it, and therefore it is not 
to be done. Sound doctrine for a Progressist. 
Well, Lady Phayre is a little indignant.” 

“ Why ? F or not taking advantage of a piece 
of empty politeness ? ” 

“ Lady Phayre’s politeness is never empty 
when it is directed towards a member of the 
party. Her name is not unknown to you ? ” 

Goddard admitted that the fame of Lady Phayre 
had reached him. 

“Well, then,” said Gleam, “I advise you, as 
your oldest political friend, to go and see her. 
She ’s a charming woman, attached heart and soul 
to the party, and can give you help in the most 
unexpected ways. There never was a success- 
ful politician yet who despised the assistance of 
women.” 

“ Many have got into rare messes through 
women,” said Goddard. 

“More have got out of them by their aid,” 
retorted Gleam convincedly. 

“ But she would be rather astonished if I turned 
up, would n’t she ? ” said Goddard. 

Gleam broke into a laugh. There were un- 
looked for simplicities in Goddard. 

5 




66 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

“ I tell you, my dear man,” he said, “ that, as 
Lady Shepherdess of the party, Lady Phayre 
expects you to go and pay her your homage. 
Hang it, man ! she paid you the compliment of 
journeying all the way to Stepney to hear you 
speak.” 

Goddard’s face assumed an air of perplexity, 
oddly at variance with its usual stern, resolute 
expression. Then the obstinacy in his nature 
asserted itself. 

“Ho. It’s very kind of Lady Phayre, and I 
feel flattered. But I ’ll stick to my own ways. 
Call me bear, or Goth, or what you like — I have 
no relish for false positions. You know who I 
am and all about me, so I don’t mind talking 
frankly to you.” 

The blood rose to his face as he said this, and 
he held up his head somewhat defiantly. He had 
barely as yet divested himself of the unqomfort- 
able impression of masquerading in his well fit- 
ting clothes, and of incongruity in refined table 
adjuncts. If these occasioned a worrying feeling 
of un familiarity, the sense of a wrong element in 
a lady’s drawing-room was still more galling. 
Gleam was keen enough to perceive these work- 
ings of false pride, and he bore Goddard no 
malice. 

“ Very well, then,” he said with a smile. “ Per- 
haps you are right in your pig-headed way. I 
must n’t keep you from your lunch. Good-bye. 
I’ll bear Ecclesby in mind.” 

He shook hands, waved a salute to one of the 


V 


THE STATS IN THEIR COURSES 67 

men at Goddard’s table, and after exchanging a 
few words with a party near the door, went away. 
Goddard returned to his beef, which was getting 
cold, and, after the meal, retired with his three 
companions to the smoking-room, where an argu- 
ment arose that banished Lady Phayre from his 
mind. 

He could have resisted Aloysius Gleam’s per- 
suasion to the crack of doom ; but when the 
stars in their courses began to take up the 
matter, he was as helpless as Sisera. If he had 
marched straight out of the club, he possibly 
might never have spoken to Lady Phayre again. 
But the stars turned his steps aside to the 
Central News tape-machine in the stranger’s wait- 
ing-room, and there he found himself suddenly 
face to face with her sitting — a dainty vision — in 
an arm-chair near the entrance. 

Her face brightened as she saw him, and she 
made a slight forward movement in expecta- 
tion of his advance. Goddard could do no less 
than acknowledge these manifestations of friend- 
liness. 

“ Have you seen Mr. Gleam in the club ? They 
are keeping me such a time waiting.” 

“I am afraid he’s gone,” said Goddard, an 
announcement which the page-boy came up that 
moment to confirm. 

“ What a nuisance,” said Lady Phayre. “ I 
want a couple of ladies’ tickets all in a hurry 
for the House. I have a country girl staying 
with me, and have only this evening free.” 


68 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 


She looked at Goddard with a little air 
of concern. Now when Lady Phayre looked at 
a man like that, she simply rested all her re- 
sponsibilities upon his shoulders. They became 
the man’s own personal affairs. Goddard was 
a man like any other. He reflected instinc- 
tively. 

“ I dare say I could get some men in the club 
to ballot for you — if you don’t mind waiting a 
little longer.” 

“Would you really try?” she said, her eyes 
beaming gratitude and apparent astonishment. 

“ With pleasure,” said Goddard. 

During his absence she turned over the ad- 
vertisement pages of a railway time-table, and 
devised in her mind various club improvements 
that might conduce to the comfort of lady 
strangers. When he came back she rose, saw 
from the look of pleasure on his face that he 
had been successful. 

“ I have seen Jervons, the member for Twicken- 
ham. He undertakes to get half-a-dozen men 
to ballot for you; so if they are successful the 
orders will be round at your house before five 
o’clock. Will that do ? ” 

“Beautifully,” said Lady Phayre: “a thousand 
thanks.” 

“I’m afraid it won’t be very interesting,” said 
Goddard — “ the Army Estimates will be on.” 

“Oh, that does n’t matter,” said Lady Phayre 
cheerfully: “the child will be pleased, whatever 
it is. I shall take a novel.” 


THE STARS IN THEIR COURSES 69 


He did not reply, but looked down at her from 
his superior height, one hand grasping his hat 
and stick, the other on' his hip. There was a 
tiny pause. So Lady Phayre looked up at him 
and smiled. There was just the faintest gleam 
of mockery in her eyes, a transient conscious- 
ness of the feminine magic that had made the 
huge, powerful man do her bidding with the 
lightness of an Ariel. She put out a delicately 
gloved hand from her sealskin muff. 

“ I was saving up a quarrel with you, Mr. 
Goddard,” she said, “ for not having been to see 
me. Surely you could have spared just one half- 
hour.” 

There was so much frankness and charm in 
her tone and in her attitude, as she stood with 
half-extended hand, and head slightly inclined 
to one side, that Goddard reddened with a sense 
of boorishness. 

“I am hardly a society man, Lady Phayre,” he 
said lamely, his pride not allowing him to formu- 
late the more conventional apology. 

She laughed. She had known men positively 
intrigue for the right of entrance at her door, 
and here was one refusing the privilege. He was 
a curiosity. Her self-pride was pricked. 

“ You mean my frivolity frightens you,” she 
said. “But I am not as frivolous as I look, 
I assure you. I can talk even earnestly at 
times.” 

“Oh, it isn’t you,” he began. 

“ Then it is my friends. Well, some of them 


yo THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PH AY RE 

are as unbutterfly-like as bats. But if you don’t 
like a crowd, avoid an ‘ at home ’ day, and come 
any afternoon.” 

“Do you honestly care whether I come or 
not ? ” asked Goddard bluntly. 

“ Well, considering that I have gone out of 
my way to ask you twice,” she replied, rather 
staggered, “ you might have taken my sincerity 
for granted.” 

She raised her chin a little, and put back her 
hand into her muff. Goddard realised that he 
had been rude. The desirable aspects of Lady 
Phayre’s friendship also began to dawn upon 
him. 

“Forgive me, Lady Phayre,” he said, after an 
awkward pause. “ You see what a bear I am.” 

The admission brought* out again smile and 
hand. 

“ Can I come and see you ? ” he added whim- 
sically. 

“Do you honestly want to ? ” she asked, echo- 
ing his tone. 

“ I should very much like to, indeed,” said 
Goddard. 

That evening Lady Phayre sent down her card, 
from behind the grating, to Aloysius Gleam. He 
came up after a while. 

“ I did n’t know you were here,” he said. 

“ Who do you think got me the tickets ? ” 

“ I have n’t the vaguest idea.” 

“Mr. Goddard,” said Lady Phayre. 


THE STARS IN THEIR COURSES 7 1 


“ Miss Mabel,” said Gleam, turning to the coun- 
try girl, who was listening to a technical state- 
ment by the War Secretary, with rapt attention, 
“ Lady Phayre is like Providence : her ways are 
inscrutable.” 


CHAPTEK YII 


A DEMAGOGUE’S IDYLL 

Goddard went away, after paying his first visit 
to Lady Phayre, with a wondering mind. His 
original intention had been to make it as short 
as he possibly could : he had remained nearly a 
couple of hours. He could scarcely believe his 
watch. 

The delicate play of mind of a pretty and 
highly cultured woman was a novelty as rare to 
him as the bubbling of champagne in his appren- 
tice days. He had gone expecting to endure the 
inane small talk which his second-hand experi- 
ence persuaded him was the inevitable adjunct of 
a lady’s tea-table; he had found conversation 
upon all the subjects dear to him invested with 
a charm such as he had never before imagined. 
Talk on social questions had ever been with him a 
deeply serious matter. Lady Phayre had brought 
into it an unknown lightness, a sparkle, a mental 
keenness, against which his own intellect sharp- 
ened itself, and at the same time a bewildering 
waywardness that never allowed him to forget 
she was a woman. In short, Lady Phayre was a 
revelation. He walked along with a buoyant step, 


A DEMAGOGUE’S IDYLL 73 

like a man who has made a new discovery that 
promises to change the old order of things. 

After a short interval a pretext arose for re- 
peating the visit. He w^as careful to magnify 
its importance for the sake of self-justification. 
But on the third occasion he owned to himself 
that he had called out of sheer desire for Lady 
Phayre’s society. 

As he stood, hat in hand, in the drawing-room 
waiting for her, he had a feeling of misgiving 
curiously like that of a hoy who is fearful lesh 
he is taking too great advantage of a kindly 
neighbour’s invitation to visit his fruit garden. 
Her smile of welcome, however, as she entered, 
reassured him. 

“How good of you to come. I had a bit 
of a headache, and was beginning to mope by 
myself.” 

“I too felt as if it would do me good to 
have a talk with you,” said Goddard, seating 
himself. 

“ Surely you don’t mope ? ” said Lady Phayre, 
lifting her eyebrows. 

“ 0 Lord, no ! ” he exclaimed with a laugh. 
“ I have too much to do.” 

“ I wish I were a man,” sighed Lady Phayre. 

“I don’t,” said Goddard. “If you were, I 
don’t think I should have wanted so much to 
come and see you.” 

“ Well, how am I to do you good ? Will tea 
comfort you ? ” 

“ I think it would,” replied Goddard, smiling — 


74 THE demagogue and lady phayre 

“ out of your gossamer tea-cups, and with im- 
perceptible films of bread and butter. They 
seem outside of the uses of the weary, work-a- 
day world.” 

“You shall have them, and until they come 
you shall tell me all the news. I have heard 
nothing for two days.” 

He opened his budget. It was somewhat 
heavy. The lighter trifles of political gossip were 
beyond his range ; but Lady Phayre listened 
attentively, adroitly brought him to his own 
part in current affairs. He had just been on 
a committee of the League, in the north of 
England, inquiring into the working of the 
Factory Act for women in certain trades. He 
had visited many white-lead works, where he 
had felt daunted by the inevitableness of the 
sacrifice of human health and happiness. 

“ But manufacturers are obliged to enforce 
precautions,” said Lady Phayre. 

Goddard waved his hand impatiently. 

“Ho precautions will ever prevent it. The 
poison gets in everywhere. The dust is in the 
air — impregnates the food, finds its way into 
the baths, creeps in through the tightest overalls. 
Women should not be allowed in it — and yet 
they must work. One feels paralysed before 
these deadly trades. I saw some women — young 
and vigorous — who had ‘ got the lead,’ as they 
call it — death written on their faces, one going 
to have a child ; that is one of the horrible parts 
of it — to be poisoned before one is born.” 


A DEMAGOGUE’S IDYLL 


7 5 


“You take it to heart,” said Lady Phayre 
in a low voice. She was touched by his 
earnestness. 

“ I suppose I do,” replied Goddard. “ If a 
man does n’t, he had better leave Social Reform 
alone.” 

Lady Phayre handed him his tea. The strong, 
heavily veined hand outstretched to receive the 
cup, conveyed to her a suggestion of strength 
which she could not help associating with the 
earnestness of his tone. For a moment Lady 
Phayre felt, not unpleasantly, the insignificance 
of her sex. 

“ Do you know, when I see men like you 
devoting your whole lives to the cause of others, 
I feel very small and petty,” she said, upon 
the impulse. 

Daniel looked at her in some confusion. No 
one had ever paid him such a tribute before. 
Coming from Lady Phayre, it gratified more 
than a man’s vanity. He laughed awkwardly. 

“ I don’t know that I do so much good after 
all,” he said. “You are a far more important 
person, really. You are in the swim of every- 
thing — the pivot of the party.” 

“ Oh, the party ! ” cried Lady Phayre. “ Some- 
times I get so tired of it. It seems to be all 
concerned with means — the end lost sight of. 
Nothing day after day but little moves, and 
counter-moves, and intrigues, and this person’s 
speech, and that person’s vote. Oh, Mr. Goddard, 
when you get into Parliament you will never de- 


76 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

velop into the typical party-man — the lobbyist, 
and asker of questions, and mover of amend- 
ments. You are so different from most of the 
other men who come here.” 

She spoke sincerely for the moment. By 
the light of Goddard’s earnestness she glanced 
ashamedly at her own political dilettanteism. A 
momentary conception of nobler effort passed 
through her mind. Womanlike she projected 
these higher subjective workings into increased 
regard for the man. When Goddard took his 
leave, he was unaware how far he had advanced 
in Lady Phayre’s good favour; but he realised 
that something new and helpful had come into 
his own life. 

After this he became a constant visitor at 
Queen’s Court Mansions. Usually he chose the 
times when Lady Phayre was alone. In the 
general society he now and then met in her 
drawing-room, he felt shy and constrained, 
blundered in his speech, and grew hot with anger 
at imaginary errors. A proud man, he was 
ashamed at himself for envying the ease of 
manner of other men. In a mixed assembly he 
was helpless. 

“ I am not coming to your omnium gatherums 
any more,” he said once to Lady Phayre. “ I 
don’t know how to talk to these people. Their 
ways are natural to them. I have to put them 
on, and I put them on crooked.” 

“ But you know how to talk to me,” she replied 
with a smile. 


A DEMAGOGUE'S IDYLL 


77 


“ You are different,” he said. “ You know 
who and what I am. You are good enough to 
take me just as birth and circumstances have 
made me.” 

She bent forward and looked him sweetly in 
the face. 

“ Be to others just as you are to me.” 

“ That ’s an utter impossibility ! ” he exclaimed 
quickly, with a flash in his eye, at which her face 
flushed. 

“ Well, perhaps not quite the same,” she said. 
“ But I like you to come occasionally and show 
yourself at my little receptions. It completes 
them, you know.” 

So Goddard withdrew his decision and strove 
to adapt himself to society ways. But it went 
sorely against the grain. The hour’s discomfort 
over, he hurried home, threw his dress-coat on 
a chair, and smoked a pipe in his shirt-sleeves 
with feelings *of intense relief. Other invita- 
tions, which Lady Phayre’s patronage necessa- 
rily procured for him, he refused with obstinate 
persistence. 

“ I do far more good, both to myself and others, 
if I put in a spare evening at a working-man’s 
club,” he said to Gleam, who was persuading him 
to take advantage of social opportunities. 

The months went by. Goddard worked with a 
zest which even he had not known before. In 
the little comedy of their lives Lady Phayre 
played Egeria with nice discrimination. Daniel 
imperceptibly acquired the habit of setting forth 


78 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

all his schemes and ambitions for her approval. 
His strenuous life had been so single-purposed 
that he had retained many simplicities, and his 
nature came fresh to receive her sympathy. The 
first time he handed her the manuscript of a 
review article he blushed like a schoolboy. It 
was a pleasant time. He was too ingenuous to 
suspect pitfalls in his path. 

His domestic life continued its usual course. 
Lizzie had spells of soberness and quasi-repent- 
ance, alternating with periods of outbreak. These 
latter, however, were growing more frequent. 
To Daniel the asperities of everyday existence 
became more and more external. A dogged, al- 
most Philistine sense of duty kept him uniformly 
kind and considerate; but he had long since 
ceased to regard her as one fulfilling any of a 
wife’s functions. 

A bond of union between Lady Phayre and 
himself was formed by the increasing rumours of 
trade disturbances at Ecclesby, and the conse- 
quent complications introduced into the choice of 
a Parliamentary candidate for the Hough division, 
in which it was situated. The sitting member 
was daily expected to accept the Chiltern Hun- 
dreds. The Conservatives had secured a strong 
candidate. The Liberal organisation was divided. 
The influential local man desired by the moderate 
section would be opposed by the Labour vote in 
favour of an Independent candidate. To save a 
three-cornered contest, the advanced section had 
approached Goddard. All through the summer. 


A DEMAGOGUE'S IDYLL 


79 


things had remained at a deadlock. Lady 
Phayre, with feminine love of intrigue, had 
stimulated her friends at Ecclesby to exert their 
influence in Goddard’s favour. 

“I am going down there in the autumn,” she 
told him one day, “ and I shall open the campaign 
in person.” 

But before she could fulfil her promise, the 
trade storm burst in Ecclesby. A general strike 
and lock-out declared itself. Attempts at com- 
promise failed hopelessly. Terms of agreement, 
suggested by a board of arbitration, were indig- 
nantly rejected by both sides. A long, bitter 
struggle seemed inevitable. Daniel watched its 
progress with intense interest. Principles of 
relation between Labour and Capital were at 
stake, in whose cause he had fought from those 
far-off days when he had carried a three-legged 
stool to Hyde Park on Sunday afternoons, and 
harangued his casual and apathetic audience. It 
was a small strike when compared with the great 
contests that have convulsed industry of late 
years ; but its result would have far-reaching 
consequences. He thirsted to join in the battle, 
but the delicacy of his position as regards the 
constituency kept his tongue silent. And as the 
days went on, and he saw that the Trades Union 
was less and less able to hold its own, he chafed 
in London, and poured out his heart to Lady 
Phayre. 

At last, one memorable day, he found him- 
self in a cab speeding to her, all too slowly. A 


80 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 


great delight was thrilling through his veins. 
Visions of fierce conflict, victory, fulfilled ambi- 
tion danced before his eyes. He sprang up the 
steps of Queen’s Court Mansions, tingling with 
the news he was carrying to his — to his what ? 
He did not know. An impulse, whose sanity 
he never questioned, brought him hither irresis- 
tibly. During the long interview with the strike 
leaders, from which he had freshly come, his 
thoughts had turned to her, had identified the 
anticipation of telling her with the pride of the 
moment. The gift of feminine sympathy was 
still so new to him that he rushed to it with a 
child’s induhitative eagerness. 

The door of the flat opened as he reached the 
landing, and Lady Phayre appeared, dressed for 
walking, in a dark fawn costume trimmed with 
fur, and a toque to match. 

“ You looked pleased,” she said, smiling at his 
dark, flushed face and shining eyes. “ Whatever 
has happened ? ” 

“I am going down to Ecclesby to lead the 
strike,” he said, panting a little. “ The Trades 
Union people have just been to me, and I have 
come to tell you at once.” 

The news pleased her, the homage flattered 
her. She beamed gracious appreciation upon 
him, invited him to enter and acquaint her with 
the details. They both remained standing in the 
drawing-room. 

“It’s very simple,” he said. “The Union is 
badly organised, is gradually losing hold on the 


A DEMAGOGUE'S IDYLL 


8l 


men. No one seems able to take the lead. They 
are making a mess of it. I was afraid they 
would. I was only telling you so lately. So 
they have begged me to come and help them.” 

“ I see,” said Lady Phayre, with kindling 
cheeks, “ they want a strong man with a strong 
will ; a leader of men.” She put out her hand 
impulsively. “ I am so proud.” 

The words and the touch of her hand quivered 
deliciously through Goddard’s frame. 

“It is the biggest thing I have been called 
upon to do yet,” he said. “Of course I have no 
official position in the matter ; I cannot approach 
the masters in any way. But the Union has 
guaranteed free action ; placed itself unreservedly 
in my hands. All the responsibility is practi- 
cally mine. I shall win,” he added, after a pause, 
during wffiich he took three or four strides back- 
wards and forwards in the room. “Somehow I 
feel it. I have eternal justice on my side. Oh, 
to think what success will mean for all these 
people ! ” 

“ And for you, my friend,” said Lady Phayre. 
“Win, and there’s Parliament for you with a 
triumphant majority.” 

He looked at her for a moment open-mouthed. 
She saw a new intelligence dawn in his glance. 

“ Do you mean to tell me you never thought of 
that ? ” she asked quickly. 

“ No,” he said simply ; “ it had not struck me.” 

Lady Phayre turned her face from him, and 
buttoned her glove. There are some feelings 
6 


82 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

which rush into a woman’s eyes that it is not 
advisable to show to the man who evokes them. 
When she had slipped the last button she looked 
up at him smilingly. 

“ I think you ’re the only man in England who 
could have said that. When do you commence 
operations ? ” 

“ The day after to-morrow. There will be a big 
open-air demonstration. Then I’ll settle down 
to regular work — visiting, picketing, speechify- 
ing, overhauling the books, agitating for help 
from cognate trades. I shall have my hands 
full.” 

He prepared to take his departure, seeing that 
she was going out. 

“ You can walk part of the way with me, if you 
like,” she said graciously. 

It was an undreamed-of honour. Save his 
mother and his wife, he did not remember to 
have walked in the street with any woman. He 
strode by her side proud and happy. Their way 
lay through Hyde Park. The October leaves 
shimmered like golden scales in the afternoon sun, 
shedding a glory around him. The few passers- 
by seemed non-existent. The great stretch of lawn 
rolled on either side towards the just visible white 
house-tops. In front the chequered path of the 
burnished avenue. From time to time his com- 
panion raised her delicate face to him. A slant- 
ing beam caught the light of her eyes and the 
gold tints of her hair under her dainty toque. A 
strange, unknown feeling stole upon his heart. 


A DEMAGOGUE’S IDYLL 83 

A great silence and splendour had fallen over 
life. 

It was Lady Phayre who broke the silence at 
last. Her voice was sweetly silvery. 

“ If I came to Ecclesby, could I be of any use 
to you?” 

“You would only have to look as you look 
now,” he answered, “and there is nothing you 
couldn’t help me to do.” 

« j » 

Lady Phayre began, stopped abruptly as a 
little tremor shook her shoulders delicately, 
then recovering herself, broke into a laugh. 

“I shall look ever so much more business- 
like, I assure you. I’ll go and make friends 
with the wives. It will be useful against can- 
vassing time. I am an old campaigner in 
electioneering, you know. But I have never 
taken an active part in a strike. It will be a 
new thing for the political woman to' do. I 
am always seeking after something new. I 
must have been an Athenian in past ages — an 
Athenian of the Athenians — and my soul got so 
impregnated that it has never been able to free 
itself. I wonder if they would let me make a 
speech, Mr. Goddard?” 

“We will ask the Union,” he laughed, 
following her unwittingly into the lighter track 
she had started upon. “ But will you really come 
and help ? ” 

“ Of course.” 

“ How can I thank you ? ” said Goddard. 


84 THE demagogue and lady phayre 

“Post me up in all the ins and outs and 
technicalities,” she replied brightly. 

He took up his parable, and told her of shifts 
and piece-work, and the intricacies of sliding- 
scales of wages, and the complications of the 
trade. And, in truth, it was a parable. For 
the idyllic hour of Goddard’s life had come, 
and air, and trees, and sun, and words all lost 
their outer sense, and became informed with 
hidden meaning. 


CHAPTEB VIII 


WITH THE HELP OF LAD Y PH A YRE 

The outskirts of Ecclesby, where the “ quality ” 
live in villas decorously withdrawn from the 
roadway, and screened from public view by the 
garden-trees, are as pleasant as those of any idle 
town given up to homing the Great Eetired. The 
traveller by road might fancy he was entering 
a Midland Cheltenham or Leamington, so sooth- 
ingly genteel are its approaches. But a few 
minutes’ walk, past smaller villas, then semi- 
detached villas, then villas clustered together like 
reeds in a pan-pipe, then unpretending red-brick 
jerry-built cottages, would bring on a gradual 
disillusion, preparing him for the hopeless dis- 
enchantment of the town itself. A long black 
street, untidy with little shops and public-houses 
standing here and there amid a row of poor, dirty 
dwelling-houses, mounts in an undecided curve 
from the railway station, and suddenly, at the top 
of the hill, twists sharply round into the High 
Street, where brand-new hotels and brand-new 
shops try to look smugly unconscious of the world 
below the corner. But the shops have to supply 
that world’s wants, and all the bravery of window 
fronts cannot give the illusion of refined and 


86 THE DEMAGOG UE AND LADY PHAYRE 

luxurious patronage. There is not much pleasure 
to be got out of Ecclesby. Even its theatre is 
up a dingy side-street, and has a threepenny gal- 
lery and sixpenny pit. The fair follies and vain 
amenities of existence find no place there. It is 
given over to labour grim, absorbing, inevitable. 
At certain periods of the day the High Street, 
Market Square, and Union Street, which cuts 
laterally through its heart, at the top of the rise, 
are quite deserted. The great bells ring, and the 
gaunt countless-windowed factories situated all 
around in labyrinthine tangle of mean streets 
disgorge into the main thoroughfare the pale 
work-grimed population they had swallowed up. 
The town becomes a swarming hive. The shops 
are thronged. From the ever-swinging doors of 
public-houses comes the roar of voices, borne 
upon gusts of air saturated with alcohol and 
shag-tobacco. There is little diversity of type 
or costume. The town exists for one industry. 
The population drifts from the grim Board school 
inevitably, unquestioningly into the grim factory. 
If the next transition is not into the grimmer 
workhouse by the railway station, they account 
themselves happy. Each man acts, dresses, eats, 
hopes, thinks, and, at last, looks like his neighbour. 
And the girls and women work in the factories 
too. The streets are alive with them. They 
march along in knots of three or four, bare- 
headed, bare-armed, red-shawled, shrill, non- 
reticent of speech. The doorways of hundreds 
of dwellings in squalid by -streets are dissonant 


WITH THE HELP OF LADY PHAYRE 87 

with the clamour and picturesque with the dirt- 
encrusted chubbiness of children. 

This is Ecclesby when the factories are work- 
ing, and the hum of strange machinery strikes 
the ear on passing by the yawning gateways. 
But w T hen Goddard went there a blight had 
fallen on the town. The factories for the most 
part were silent, the streets depressing with 
un joyous idleness. The fact that the strikers 
had gone in procession the day before with a 
brass band that played the Dead March in 
“Saul” before the employers’ villas had not 
produced lasting exhilaration. The very deadly 
boredom of leisure, apart from anxiety as to 
issues, was wearing down the adult population. 
To lean against a street corner, pipe in mouth, 
hands in pockets, in taciturn converse with one’s 
mates, is pleasant enough for a few hours on 
Saturday afternoons ; but to persist in it all 
day long, and day after day, induces con- 
siderable lassitude of the flesh and infinite 
weariness of the spirit. What the deputation 
had told Goddard was true. The men were 
growing sick of the struggle. Whispers of 
submission already floated in the air. The 
Trades Union officials w T ere steadily losing their 
influence. The employers’ agents had been 
busy among them, spreading nerve-shaking 
reports as to the impregnable position of the 
firms. The Union was small, poor, badly 
organised. The strike pay was scanty. Much 
of it was spent, almost unwillingly, in drink. 


88 THE demagogue and lady phayre 

Severe distress already began to make itself 
felt. 

Goddard brought a practised intelligence to 
grasp the situation, and realised how fully his 
were victory, if it were gained ; also how great a 
responsibility rested upon his shoulders in urging 
the continuance of the strike. It meant the 
extravagant love or execration of a teeming 
town. 

“ If you advise us to give in, we ’ll do so,” 
said the secretary of the Union, a careworn 
man with iron-grey hair and lantern-face. 
They had been discussing affairs in the office. 
The fire had gone out in the tiny grate, and 
the dimness of a gathering wet evening crept 
in through the uncleaned panes. Goddard was 
silent a moment. The man’s tone was so 
hopeless. 

Then the joy of battle rose within him, and 
was mingled strangely with the radiance of 
Lady Phayre — a thrilling sense of his own 
strength, trebled by the wine of her influence 
— and he leapt from his chair and brought his 
two great hands down on the secretary’s timorous 
shoulders. 

“ We ’ll win this, mate. We ’ll carry it through, 
and have the firms on their knees. Euin is 
staring them in the face. They will have to 
climb down. Man, we are not fighting machi- 
nery. If we were, I would say ‘throw it up.’ 
Man has never bested a machine yet, and never 
will. It ’s mere brute force — who can hold out 


WITH THE HELP OF LADY PHAYRE 89 

longest. And they can’t hold out longer than 
we. I ’ll stake my soul upon it.” 

“ But the capital behind them,” murmured the 
secretary. 

“ That \s a pack of damned lies ! ” cried God- 
dard. “ You can take it from me ! ” 

A glow appeared on the grey face as Goddard’s 
splendid assurance gained upon him. 

“We’ll follow your lead past starvation, sir,” 
he said in a voice hoarse with new-born hope. 

The knowledge of Goddard’s arrival had quick- 
ened the general apathy. His visible presence 
in the streets was a draught of strength. The 
brave words he spoke to casual knots of 'men 
turned their sullenness to hope, and were passed 
from lip to lip after he had gone by. Before the 
great meeting in the afternoon, he had already 
lifted the tone of the strikers. They were con- 
scious of a new force among them. 

When he mounted the platform in the densely 
packed market-place, a spontaneous cheer arose to 
greet him. When he retired, after a long, vigor- 
ous speech, he knew that he had accomplished 
the first and all-important part of his task — the 
winning of the men’s confidence. 

And then began a period of intense, unremit- 
ting work. For beyond the commonplaces of 
strike organisation, picketing, fund-distribution, 
speech-making, and the like, the continuous main- 
tenance of the moral strength of a whole com- 
munity by sheer force of will involved infinite 
devotion. He had to carry things with a high 


QO THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

hand. The Employers’ Federation invited a con- 
ference. For a while he had high hopes. The 
hour came, and the whole town awaited the issue 
in breathless suspense. Goddard sat alone in the 
little office of the Union, chafing at his necessary 
exclusion from the discussion. At last the repre- 
sentatives of the Union returned, the secretary 
bearing a paper in his hand. 

“Shall we agree?” he asked, giving it to 
Goddard. 

He glanced over it, and his face darkened. 

“ Can I make this public ? ” 

“Certainly, if you think it best,” replied the 
secretary, with a sigh. 

“ Thank God, it ’s over, any way,” said one of 
the representatives. 

But Goddard did not hear. He flung open 
the window and brandished the paper before the 
crowd assembled in the street. 

“ Men ! listen to the result of the conference.” 

He read the document in a loud, even voice. 
The employers had offered a few trivial conces- 
sions, a slight rise in skilled wages ; but the 
principles were untouched. He hurried through 
the last clause ; and before there was time for a 
cry to come from below, he tore the paper across 
and across with a passionate gesture, and scat- 
tered the pieces on the heads of the crowd. 
The men, who had listened in silent submission 
to what they thought were the final terms agreed 
upon, burst into a great cheer. The dramatic 
touch had quickened the revulsion of feeling. 


WITH THE HELP OF LADY PHAYRE 9 1 


“ There, gentlemen,” said Goddard, turning 
round to the representatives. “ I have burned 
your ships for you.” 

A day or two afterwards Lady Phayre appeared 
upon the scene. She was coming on business — 
not pleasure, she had informed her friends, and 
accordingly laid house, carriages, and servants 
under requisition. Mr. Christopher Wentworth, 
her host, was the leading member of the Pro- 
gressive League in the neighbourhood, and a 
humble vassal of Lady Phayre. His wife’s in- 
terests in life extended from her husband’s 
throat, which was delicate, to his digestive or- 
gans, which were dainty. 

“So long as you don’t take Christopher to 
open-air meetings, Rhodanthe,” she said to Lady 
Phayre, “ and give him bronchitis, or make him 
late for dinner, you can do exactly what you 
like.” 

“ Oh, I don’t want Christopher. He would be 
sadly in the way,” said Lady Phayre, reassuringly. 
“ I ’ll make him stay at home and write letters 
and collect funds.” 

She summoned Goddard to wait upon her. He 
had already received two or three daintily penned 
letters from London, and had been eagerly 
looking forward to this one from Ecclesby it- 
self. 

He found her alone in the bright morning- 
room, radiant as Romney’s Bacchante head of 
Lady Hamilton that hung on the wall, and 
wearing the simplest of elegantly-cut blue serge 


92 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

costumes. Her sunniness almost dazed his eyes, 
accustomed lately to the gloom of sordid homes 
and pinched faces. She was eager to hear all 
the details of the situation ; drew from him an 
exhaustive report. Her presence lifted him into 
a sanguine mood, filled him with a vague sweet 
sense of the triumph of life. 

“ Now let me tell you something,” she said 
when he had finished. “Don’t say I am not 
a woman of character. I have been bursting 
with it since you came into the room, and I 
have waited patiently. I have arranged a sur- 
prise for you. I am going to institute at once 
a children’s halfpenny tea-house. Have n’t you 
heard anything about it ? ” 

“ Not a word.” 

“ I am so glad.” She laughed, and clapped her 
hands. “ It has all been going on under your 
very nose. My own idea. It is the children 
that suffer so. They don’t know why they should 
hear with hunger. So I am going to give them 
a great breakfast or tea, with as much bread and 
butter as they can eat, for a halfpenny.” 

“ But the funds ? ” asked Goddard. 

“That is the greatest stroke of all,” replied 
Lady Phayre enthusiastically. “ I have inveigled 
a grant out of the League, and the Evening 
Chronicle has promised me to start a subscrip- 
tion list to-night. I am negotiating for the use 
of the Salvation Army Barracks, and Evans and 
Williams are going to contract for the meals. 
Have n’t I been industrious ? ” 


WITH THE HELP OF LADY PHAYRE 93 


“ You have,” said Goddard. “ It will be a tre- 
mendous help to us.” 

“ You don’t mind my having kept it a secret 
from you ? ” she asked after some further dis- 
cussion; “I wanted it to come as a surprise to 
you — to cheer you with a little unexpected help.” 

She put her hands in her lap, and bent forward 
with a pretty air of humility. A faint note of 
wistfulness in her voice increased its charm. 

All Goddard could say was that the scheme 
had been perfect. He tried to say more, but 
his unaccustomed brain refused to formulate in 
words subtleties of emotion. But before leaving 
he had a sudden inspiration. 

“ I feel a different man since I have seen you,” 
he said abruptly ; “ I was inclined to be harassed 
and despondent. How — ‘Strange how a smile 
of God can change the world.’ That ’s what you 
seem to be.” 

Lady Phayre turned away her head and 
blushed. She knew it was like a school-girl, 
but she could not help it. Ho one had ever 
told her quite that before. The glimpse into 
spiritual things rather frightened her. She did 
not know whether to be angry or pleased at 
being enraptured. Like a wise woman, she 
decided upon indefiniteness. But she could not 
hide a certain softness in her eyes as she bade 
him good-bye. 

“I shall be in the Salvation Army Barracks 
at nine this evening. If you could help me just 
a little — unless you are too busy ? ” 


94 THE demagogue and lady phayre 

He promised, delighted, and went away on 
house-to-house visits in the dark byways of the 
town, spreading everywhere, with great voice 
and hearty gestures, the overflow of his happiness. 
He felt himself filled with the spirit of victory. 
One man refused to he comforted. 

“ Strikes never did no good,” he said. 

Goddard drew himself up, towered over him, 
and rated him for pusillanimity. If he could 
have spoken his inmost heart, he would have 
shouted — * 

“Man, don’t you see that I am unconquer- 
able ! ” 

And so for the next few days the men were 
held together and lifted by the one man’s 
happiness. 

Meanwhile the Children’s Tavern was a great 
success. Lady Phayre worked indefatigably, 
serving herself, with other helpers, behind the 
trestles ranged round the great bare hall and 
creaking beneath the load of great tea-urns, 
mountains of bread and butter, and, in the morn- 
ing, steaming pans of porridge. Goddard loved 
to make his way through the crowd of clamorous 
unwashed children to the place where Lady 
Phayre, deliciously fresh in white bib-apron and 
turned-back cuffs, was busily dispensing viands, 
receiving pence and halfpence from grubby 
little hands, and paying for countless moneyless 
urchins from a great private store of coppers 
by her side. And after the press was over, she 
would emerge from behind the trestles and walk 
up and down the hall with him discussing affairs. 


WITH THE HELP OF LADY PHAYRE 95 

Never had she seemed so near to him as now 
when a common interest united them. But in 
Goddard’s fresh, newly awakened idealism, it was 
not her arm that brushed his on a common level, 
but it was her wings that touched his head. 

Sometimes he would meet her in the streets, 
on a round of visits among such homes as she 
knew ; sometimes he would see her sitting in the 
dog-cart, with her host, on the outskirts of a 
crowd he was addressing. Once she even per- 
suaded him to accept a dinner invitation at the 
Wentworths’. She grew more into his life daily. 

The strain of his position, as arbiter of the 
struggle, grew more intense. Rumours of the 
larger firms being backed up by the great capi- 
talist Rosenthal were gaining hopeless credence. 
At another fruitless conference, one of the em- 
ployers boasted that they could maintain a lock- 
out for a couple of years. Goddard summoned a 
great mass-meeting of operatives, and gave the 
manufacturer the lie with passionate vehemence. 
Once more he imposed his will upon them. 

He was fighting this battle as he had never 
fought before. Every aim of his life seemed to 
be merged in the issue. Not only were the great 
principles of the rights of labour at stake, not 
only the present and future happiness of this 
great community, but his own career seemed to 
hang in the balance, and, in a strange, uncom- 
prehended way, his credit with Lady Phayre. 

At last the London world began to clamour 
for Lady Phayre. A rift was threatening to 


9 6 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

appear in the Progressive lute. “ You only can 
put things straight,” wrote Aloysius Gleam. 
“ Fenton and Hendrick have humped each other’s 
heads in the dark, and they are angry with one 
another, and we are all taking sides. You must 
bring them to kiss and make friends over your 
dinner-table.” So Lady Phayre deliberated. She 
had one very good reason for remaining at 
Ecclesby ; but, on the other hand, she had fifty 
little feminine ones for leaving it. The work 
she had taken in hand, the Children’s Tavern, was 
in capital going order. She had already found 
her own services, as attendant, superfluous. She 
was free to resign the charge of it into competent 
hands. Why should she stay ? It was not often 
that Lady Phayre did not know her own mind. 
At last she compromised. She would pay a visit 
to London, to effect the desired reconciliation, 
and then return to Ecclesby. 

“I don’t like leaving you at all,” she said 
to Goddard, the evening before her departure. 
“ It seems as if I am deserting you. But I 
shall make haste back.” 

“ Ah, do ! ” said Goddard pleadingly. “ The 
people have grown so fond of you. And you 
are such a heip to me.” 

To atone fc>r her defection, she had dismissed 
the carriage, and allowed him to see her home 
after the tea at the Salvation Army Barracks. 
It was already night, but the moon had risen, 
and lent a tenderness to things. Lady Phayre 
was glad of its aid, for it was on her con- 


WITH THE HELP OF LADY PHAYRE 97 

science to leave Goddard with comfortable im- 
pressions. 

“ I have done very little, ” she replied. 

“You have advised me at every turn,” said 
Goddard. 

“You have advised yourself ^while talking to 
me. ” 

“ Anyhow, I could not have got on without 
you. ” 

“ Believe it then, if it pleases you, ” she said 
softly. “ You can write me a daily account of 
things, if you like — and I will go on ‘advising’ 
you. Will that do ? ” 

“ You are too good to me, ” he said fervently. 

They walked on a little in silence. Then she 
asked him how much longer he thought the 
strike would last. 

“ Another fortnight must see the end of the 
employers’ resources,” he said with conviction. 
“ The game of bluff can’t last longer. ” 

“ And are you sure that the Bosenthal story 
is a myth ? ” 

“ As sure as I am that the moon is shining 
on your face. ” 

Upon the word, the moon disappeared behind 
a cloud. Lady Phayre started, and touched his 
sleeve. 

“ Oh, what a bad omen ! ” 

But Daniel laughed. Omens had no place in 
his downright philosophy. 

“ Well, Juliet calls the moon inconstant, ” said 
Lady Phayre gaily. “ So we won’t believe it. ” 


98 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

“ I only have to keep the men up till then, ” 
said Goddard. 

“ And you will do it, Mr. Goddard, ” she replied. 
“ It will be a great victory, and we shall all be so 
proud of you. ” 

So Goddard went to sleep that night with hope 
thrilling through his dreams. And he woke up 
the next morning and went about his work, and 
longed for Lady Phayre. She might be back in 
five days. 

But before the five days were up, Bosenthal’s 
support of the Employers’ Association became a 
matter of public certainty. 

“ I will not believe it, ” shouted Goddard to the 
grey-faced secretary. “ Nothing but the sight of 
Rosenthal’s cheque would convince me. If you 
give in now, you ’ll be throwing up the most 
glorious victory labour ever won in this country. 
You are fools — wretched, cowardly, credulous 
fools. ” 

But the tide of conviction had set in. He was 
powerless against it. He strove with the pas- 
sionate rage of his nature, exhausted himself in 
wild, furious effort. The end came with over- 
whelming rapidity. Goddard felt that he had 
lost his Waterloo. 


CHAPTER IX 


SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL MOMENTS 

Goddard mounted the stairs of Queen’s Court 
Mansions with a heavy tread. He was physically 
tired, and his heart was sullenly sore. He had 
felt himself irresistibly drawn hither, though his 
pride hated the ordeal of confessing his failure 
to a woman, especially to Lady Phayre. The old, 
fierce class feeling was ineradicable. She was 
above him. Success, brilliance alone could keep 
him on her level. Failure brought him down. A 
glimmering realisation of this had come to him in 
the train, and he had pulled up his coat-collar 
angrily, and doggedly resolved to swallow his 
humble-pie to the last mouthful. But it did not 
occur to do otherwise than drive straight to her 
from the railway station. 

He deposited his bag and ulster in the hall, and 
followed the servant into the drawing-room. The 
first glimpse of it cheered him. The subdued 
light, the dancing fire, the warm tones of carpet 
and curtains, the cosy atmosphere, the charm of 
perfectly harmonised surroundings, struck grate- 
fully upon his senses. 

Lady Phayre dropped on the hearthrug the 
book she w T as reading, and rising quickly, made 


100 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 


a step or two to meet him. Her eyes were 
wide, in great concern. 

“ Oh, liow tired you are looking. Come and 
sit down, in the big chair by the fire. It was 
good of you to come. See, I have been waiting 
for you — with Moumouth. ” 

She smiled, and directed her glance down- 
wards to the^white cat which had stalked up and 
was rubbing itself, with arched back and out- 
standing fur, against Goddard’s legs. He stooped 
and patted the beast. 

“ I am just done-up, ” he said, sitting down 
wearily in the chair, and throwing back his head. 

He was looking exhausted. A pallor appeared 
beneath his dark skin ; his eyes were rather 
sunken, thus bringing into strange relief his some- 
what massively hewn features. A strand of black 
straight hair fell from the side-parting across his 
forehead. Lady Phayre, standing with one hand 
on the back of her chair, regarded him pityingly. 

“ Have you had anything to eat ? ” 

“ Oh, yes ; I think so. ” 

“ Tell me when. Ah ! I see you have n’t. I ’ll 
order you something in the dining-room. ” 

“ I couldn’t think — ” he began; but she 
interrupted him. 

“ You must, to please me. I can’t bear to 
see you so tired. You will feel quite a different 
man. And a small bottle of champagne. ” 

Man has not been born of a woman who could 
have refused Lady Phayre, when she spoke with 
that coaxing charm. 


SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL MOMENTS IOI 


Goddard’s face softened into assent, and he 
followed her with his eyes, in a dumb, wonder- 
ing way, as she went to give the necessary 
directions. 

He had never quite familiarised himself with 
his surroundings in that room. It always seemed 
a corner of Paradise that had somehow got left 
behind upon the unlovely earth. The feeling 
had never been so strong as at present. With 
his brain throbbing from the painful emotions 
of the day, his eyes still dazed by the various 
scenes — the mean, squalid streets, the grim, closed 
factories, the poverty-stricken homes, the idle, 
sullen men lounging at street-corners, the crowd 
of gaunt, unresponsive faces at the meeting — 
and with his body exhausted with fatigue and 
hunger, this warm nest of exquisite peace and 
comfort was deliciously unreal. Even Moumouth, 
luxuriously coiled on his velvet cushion, seemed 
a creature of a different sphere from that of 
the lean grey cats he had seen darting from 
doorways across alleys, preceding the appearance 
of red-shawled women. And the voice of Lady 
Phayre hummed like far-away music in his ears, 
and her delicate womanly sympathy was like 
soft hands against his cheek. It was almost a 
dream. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, 
his fingers through his hair. He longed for her 
to come back, so that he could tell her of the 
failure. Somehow, it no longer struck him as an 
ordeal. The magic of her presence had charmed 
away his repugnance. 


102 THE DEMAGOGUE A AD LADY PHAYRE 

She returned, knelt down on the long fender- 
stool, and spread out her hands before the 
blaze. 

“ They won’t be long. ” 

She turned her head sideways towards him as 
she spoke. Her attitude was alive with feminine 
grace and charm. 

“ You are as good as you are beautiful, ” he said, 
in reply to her hospitable remark. 

She met his full glance, and smiled contentedly. 
The blunt sincerity of the tribute compensated 
for its lack of the finer imaginative shades. There 
was a moment’s silence. Then she raised her 
eyes again, but this time with sad expectancy. 

“ Well ? ” 

He broke out in a kind of groan. 

“ It ’s all over. I need n’t tell you that. You 
got my letter this morning, and you must have 
guessed from my wire this afternoon. We give 
in to-morrow unconditionally — after all these 
weeks of struggle and sacrifice. It is the most 
crushing blow labour has ever had. And I ’ll 
stake my existence another week would have 
seen them through. Eosenthal is no more going 
to finance these firms than he is going to finance 
me. It has been cruel. I have been working 
at it since six o’clock this morning. It has been 
like trying to fly a kite with a cannon-ball at its 
tail. At the meeting this afternoon I did all I 
knew. I have never lost my head with passion 
before. They were all like dead men ; went 
away dragging their boots. Some of them 


SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL MOMENTS 103 

cursed me. Managers came round me after- 
wards. ‘ Didn’t I know? The strike fund was 
exhausted. ’ . As if I was ignorant of it ! * Two 

more days would see the end of it. ’ I said, ‘ In 
God’s name, see the two days out. ’ They shook 
their heads; were going to announce surrender 
then and there ; hut I managed to make them put 
it off till the morning. And then I came away — 
eating my heart out. ” 

He set his teeth and glowered at the fire. The 
story of the defeat had brought back the bitter- 
ness in all its intensity. Lady Phayre did not 
speak, instinctively knowing that, with him, 
silence was the truest sympathy. 

“ The bitter part to me, ” he continued, with 
note of passion that vibrated through the woman, 
“ is, that if I could have had a hundredth part of 
the grip on them to-day that I had a week ago, I 
should have brought them through. I know it 
as I know water goes down hill. I have failed. 
■It is my failure. I have been responsible for all 
these poor creatures’ sacrifices during the past 
weeks ; and now all the poverty, hunger, despair, 
for nothing. You saw what it was a few days 
ago. You should have been there this morning. 
I saw a man seize a bit of bread and treacle out 
of a child’s hand and begin to devour it — like 
a wolf — I could n’t stand it. ” 

Lady Phayre looked at him quickly, and then 
for the first time noticed a slight bruise and an 
abrasion on his forehead. She drew her own 
conclusions. 


104 THE demagogue and lady phayre 


“ Oh, the awful misery of it all, ” said Goddard 
between his teeth. 

“ I am sorry, ” said Lady Phayre in a low voice, 
“ sorry to my inmost heart ; but I am sorrier for 
you. ” 

“Ah! you mustn’t say that,” cried Goddard 
passionately. “Think — you couldn’t mean it. 
It would be inhuman ! ” 

“ It is only too human, murmured Lady 
Phayre. 

He was about to speak, when the maid-servant 
announced that the supper was ready ; so, instead 
of replying to Lady Phayre’s murmur, he remained 
silently wondering. 

She led the way into the dining-room, where 
a dainty but substantial meal was spread — a piece 
of salmon with crisp salad, a truffled pie, a cold 
fruit-tart. Only one place was laid. It had 
seemed to Lady Phayre she could give him kinder 
welcome if she sat by him as he ate than if she 
went through the formal pretence of joining 
him at the meal. Then she wondered, in the 
feminine way, whether he was cognisant of it. 
The servant uncorked the champagne and retired. 
Lady Phayre sat down near him, resting her elbow 
on the table. At first he leaned back in his chair, 
looked at his plate, then at her. 

“ I feel too sick at heart to eat. The thought 
of those poor starving women and children ! ” 

“ Your going without food will not fill their 
mouths, you know, ” said Lady Phayre in sympa- 
thetic remonstrance. 


SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL MOMENTS 105 

“ I suppose I feel my own personal humiliation 
too, ” he said ungraciously, as if forcing out the 
admission. “ One may as well be honest. It ’s 
the biggest thing I ’ve set my hand to as yet, 
with everything depending upon it. And to 
have to throw it up when victory was staring 
one in the face ! It is maddening ! ” 

He bent forward impatiently and took up his 
fork. He laid it on his plate, and turned to Lady 
Phayre. 

“ You are the only person in the world I could 
say that to. ” 

“Do you know why ? ” 

The words w T ere half whispered, but she looked 
at him full and clearly. 

“ Because you are yourself, I suppose — your 
good opinion dear to me, your sympathy a 
necessity. ” 

“ And all that because you know I believe 
in you. ” 

Her eyes fell beneath his gaze, which was 
stern and yet half pleading. Then she raised 
them again slowly, with the delicious upward 
sweep of her lashes, and repeated — 

“ I believe in you. ” 

A thrill ran through the man ; his dark, power- 
ful face lit up. Lady Phayre shifted her attitude, 
and broke into a silvery laugh. 

“ And all this time you are not eating. If you 
don’t begin at once I shall go away. ” 

Goddard laughed shamefacedly, with a vague 
consciousness that he had been ungracious in 


10 6 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

not having commenced before. He helped him- 
self to the salmon. After the first mouthful or 
two his aversion to food disappeared, and he 
went on eating with the appetite of a big- 
framed, very hungry man. With the exception 
of a sandwich and a glass of beer at the station 
bar before starting, he had eaten nothing since 
his early breakfast. The food and the wine 
restored his physical well-being. Lady Phayre 
looked on, pleased, she could scarcely tell why. 
These big, earnest men were sometimes like 
babies — so helpless, if left to themselves. She 
tended on him now and then in a pretty way 
without leaving her seat, passed his plate, handed 
him the little silver jug of cream, and, when 
the meal was over, fetched from a cupboard a 
box of cigarettes. Like a man unaccustomed to 
delicate feminine ministrations, Goddard accepted 
them rather tongue-tied, with a certain tremulous 
bashfulness. The little hospitable actions, so 
homely and therefore charming to a man of 
gentler nurture, were to him full of a rare exotic 
sweetness. All through the meal she exerted 
herself to talk to him brightly of little things, 
incidents that had brought them into pleasant 
contact during the late struggle. He finished 
his cigarette, and they returned to the drawing- 
room. 

Goddard stood before the fire, with his hands 
in his jacket pockets. The sense of personal 
humiliation still smouldered within him, but the 
raging of the flame had been subdued. He 


SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL MOMENTS' lOy 

felt that he could hold up his head again. And 
it was the loyal tender sympathy of that woman 
in the low arm-chair before him who had brought 
it about. He had never known before how a 
woman could be a necessity in a man’s life. 
Till then he even had not realised how imperi- 
ous were the cravings for her, in spite of the 
revolt of his galled pride, during that weary 
journey back to town. She looked so fair and 
exquisite. His eyes met hers. But something 
more than her beauty stirred the eternal mas- 
culine within him, and when he spoke his voice 
vibrated. 

“ Will you always treat me like this, Lady 
Phayre ? ” 

She smiled. 

“ Is it much to do for you ? ” 

“ It is growing to mean everything in the 
world to me. I have lived a rough life away 
from women — ladies — - women like you. Hitherto 
it has never occurred to me that I was not self- 
sufficing — that I could ever look to a woman for 
help. A year ago I should have laughed at it — 
thought it a sickly fancy of the hyper-sensitive 
semi-men in novels. But I have needed you 
this day, and I came to you because something 
stronger than I impelled me. And you have 
given me new life to-night. Ho you know 
that?” 

“ You were looking so worn out and sad when 
you came in, that it pained me,” said Lady 
Phayre, non-committally. 


108 THE DEMAGOGUE AMD LADY PHAYRE 


But Goddard’s ear detected a soft note in her 
voice. He came near to her, sat down on the 
fender-stool, almost by her knees. 

“ Why are all women not like you ? What a 
great beautiful world it would be. ” 

“ Any woman would have done the same ; 
given you of her best to cheer you. Besides, 
I was grieved — you have worked so nobly. 
Everybody has been talking about you — of 
nothing else. I felt so proud I had been work- 
ing with you in my poor way — and I had set 
my heart upon your winning. ” 

“ And I have failed miserably, ” said Goddard. 
“ Therefore you ought to feel I was unworthy of 
your trust. ” 

“You don’t mean that. It hurts me,” she 
cried quickly, really wounded. 

Goddard’s heart came into his eyes. The 
goddess had come down from the far-off pedestal 
where he had worshipped her, and was by his 
side, throbbing woman. He had a strange in- 
toxicating sense of her nearness. He raised his 
hand and touched the edges of the feather fire- 
screen she was holding in her lap. 

“ Forgive me,” he said. “ It is hard to believe 
that my success or my failure is of concern to 
you. ” 

“ Why is it hard ? ” she asked in a low voice, 
looking down. 

“ Because it means more than my wildest 
dreams could ever bid me hope,” he replied, 
with a sudden rush of passion. 


SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL MOMENTS log 

There was a long silence. Lady Phayre could 
find no words to answer, conscious that her mute- 
ness was an expectation of fuller avowal. 

But Goddard’s brain was whirling with wonder 
and strange joy. His hand sunk a hair’s-breadth, 
and touched her knee. The contact was electric 
to him. He drew his hand away quickly, and, 
rising to his feet, stretched himself, as if he had 
awakened out of a dream. He could scarcely 
realise what had happened. His enthusiastic 
practical life had not been fertile in psychologi- 
cal moments. Lady Phayre looked up at him 
with angelic sweetness. Generally more graceful 
than seductive, she was bewilderingly woman 
at this moment. Suddenly, with an instinct of 
self-preservation, she rose too, and laughed. 

“ I told you I believed in you, you know. Our 
little faiths are of moment to us. ” 

Her light tone saved the situation. Talk was 
resumed, but it did not flow so spontaneously as 
before. At last Goddard rose to leave. She was 
solicitous as to his rest. Had he any more work 
to-night ? 

“ I am going straight home, ” he answered, 
with a laugh. 

He held her hand for a long time and looked 
her in the eyes. 

“ You will sleep happier than if you had not 
come to me ? ” she asked. 

“ Ah ! God bless you, ” he said, rather huskily. 

And then he squeezed her hand, and went 
hurriedly from the room. 


CHAPTER X 


LADY PHAYRE THROWS HER CAP OVER 
THE WINDMILLS 

It had been a quick rough grasp, bringing to 
Lady Phayre a new conception of handshakes. 
It had not been violent like that of certain per- 
fervid ones among her friends, forcing the rings 
into her delicate flesh ; hut her hand tingled, and 
the tingling mounted her arm and died away in 
a flutter in her bosom. Involuntarily she held 
up the hand in front of her, saw that it trembled 
a little, and then laid it against her cheek. A 
swift consciousness of the act brought a flush to 
her face. But instead of drawing away her hand, 
she moved it slightly so that her lips touched the 
palm, and there it stayed while she gave herself 
up to a day-dream. And the smile rose into her 
eyes which no one has ever seen in a woman’s, 
except when she has been taken unawares ; which 
only comes when she is alone, and is looking half 
tremulously, half amusedly into her heart. 

Gradually, however, the smile grew dim with 
a gathering moisture. She was not a woman 
to whom tears came readily. She was surprised 
and glad. They were a delicate test of the 
sincerity of her emotion. A drop hung on the 


LADY PHAYRE THROWS HER CAP III 

lower lid for a moment and fell upon the back 
of her fingers, losing itself among the rings. 
Her heart melted over Goddard. Failure for 
him was different from failure for other men. 
The wherefore of this conclusion she did not 
argue out, content with the assurance of its 
truth in her own mind. The great battle, into 
whose side-issues she herself had been drawn, 
was lost. She was sorry. But she had spoken 
truly when she had said she was sorrier for 
him. The fallen cause was merged in the 
defeated man. Her thoughts drifted towards 
plans of consolation. 

It was very still, silence only broken by the 
whirr of the little leaping flame jets in the fire. 
The white cat rose from the hearthrug, stretched 
himself, stole noiselessly over the pile carpet to 
the centre of the room, and then, after a dubious 
wag of the tail, returned to slumber. Lady 
Phayre did not change her attitude. Her 
occupation engrossed her. She was compound- 
ing balm for Goddard — a new and wondrous 
panacea, whose secret she had just discovered — 
an extract of many feminine simples as old as the 
leaves on the Tree of Knowledge. 

The sudden opening of the door caused her 
to start with a foolish hope that it might be 
Goddard returning. But the neat maid-servant, 
in her subdued voice, announced Mr. Gleam. 

He came forward eagerly, his dry equable face 
glowing with excitement. 

“ Have you seen Goddard ? ” 


1 12 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 


He was too preoccupied with his business 
even to linger his usual moment over her 
finger-tips. 

“ He has been here. Why do you want him ? ” 
The question was in a breath with the reply. 
Something had happened. She caught Gleam’s 
excitement, half rose in her chair, and looked up 
at him anxiously. 

“ To tell him some news. Great news. Glo- 
rious news. I am the only one who has got it. 
The enemy have been weakening all the time — 
a rift within their lute. Rosenthal has backed 
out. Cleaver & Flyte are in a panic — • Rosen- 
thal was behind them, you know. The others 
can’t stand alone. It ’s utter rout! ” 

“ But it ’s too late ! ” exclaimed Lady Phayre, 
with a ring of dismay in her voice. “ Haven’t 
you heard ? ” 

“ It is n’t. Not yet, ” replied Gleam animatedly. 
“The managers won’t declare till to-morrow 
morning — unless they are fools. But I have 
more precise news still. You did not let me 
finish, ” he laughed apologetically. “ They will 
give in all along the line if the men hold out 
another four-and -twenty hours. ” 

“ They must hold out, ” cried Lady Phayre. 
“ Oh, why is n’t Goddard there ? ” 

“ Better he should be here — if I could only 
get at him. Wiring couldn’t have been definite 
enough. It ’s not safe. Let me track him down, 
and off he goes by the midnight train, or the 
newspaper train, and then — ” 


LADY PHAYRE THROWS HER CAP 1 13 

“ He will win,” cried Lady Phayre exultantly. 

“ Of course. Come, see, conquer. As easy as 
lying. That is why I have killed three cab 
horses under me to find him. I was in despair. 
I knew he had left Ecclesby. At his house they 
assured me he was not in London — did not ex- 
pect him for a couple of days. Ho news at the 
clubs — his offices. Then I came here. Thank 
Heaven, he is in London, at any rate. If I can’t 
find him, some one else will have to go down.” 

“ And Goddard lose his triumph after all ? He 
must be found. Besides, they would not believe 
any one else.” 

“ I was thinking of going myself, en dernier 
ressort ,” said Gleam rather quizzically, “ just as I 
am. I think they would believe me.” 

“ So would the masters. A member of Parlia- 
ment in dress clothes going about at six o’clock 
in the morning ! Besides, you would catch your 
death of cold.” 

She laughed playfully, but she was trembling 
all through with suppressed joy. The knuckles 
of her hand, that held a futile ball of a hand- 
kerchief, were white. There was a little pause. 
She looked on the ground for a moment, then 
she lifted her long lashes, and regarded him half- 
shy ly, with a smile playing round her lips. 

“ What would you say if I told you where you 
can find him?” 

“ Anything,” cried Gleam. “ Where is he ? ” 

“At the Midland Grand Hotel.” 

She told the lie with astounding charm. He 
8 


1 14 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

whipped up his hat from the table and turned 
towards her. 

“Why did I not come to you at once? You 
are not a woman, but an Immortal. A crisis — 
a time of difficulty — and you come out of a rosy 
cloud like an Homeric goddess.” 

Lady Phayre smiled on him divinely. She 
held out her hand. 

“ I won’t keep you. I am as eager as you are.” 

In another minute she heard the wheels of his 
departing cab in the street below. She broke 
into a little ringing laugh : he had gone so 
promptly and unquestioningly on his fool’s er- 
rand. A woman in an exalted condition of mind 
has a queer sense of humour. 

A wild fancy had seized her. It had grown 
into an irrepressible desire. Her woman’s wit 
had worked swiftly. The lie had mounted to her 
lips on wings of triumph, and spread radiance over 
her face. No wonder Gleam was enraptured. 

Women who are in the habit of throwing their 
caps over windmills find it as monotonous as 
anything else after a time ; but for one who has 
never done it before,- the act is accompanied with 
a rare exhilaration. 

Lady Phayre had lived a bright but perfectly 
exemplary life. No breath of scandal had ever 
rested upon her name. Sir Ephraim had cloyed 
her with affection, and hitherto she had regarded 
amatory offerings with a young confectioner’s 
serene indifference to puffs. If she dared now 
and then to flout at convention, she was only 


LADY PHAYRE THROWS HER CAP 1 1 5 


exercising the privileges of her position. No one 
could find a word to say against it. To have 
driven to a politician’s house at night to deliver a 
political message was a commonplace of propriety. 
But to take the message of victory to the man she 
loved, knowing, with a thrill that quivered from 
her feet to her hair, that the message would con- 
tain also the openly avowed gift of herself — that 
set matters on a totally different plane. It was 
wild, daring, unutterably sweet. The breathless 
moment that followed the lie was the supreme 
point of happiness in Lady Phayre’s life. 

She went to a writing-table, took a sheet of 
the crested, delicately scented paper, and wrote a 
hurried line, which she enclosed in an envelope 
and thrust in her corsage. Then she rang for 
her maid, and in a few moments was speeding 
across London in a hansom cab. The cold air 
caught her face, filling her with a joyous sense 
of vitality. She pictured, glowingly, the little 
scene that would take place. First, his look of 
wondering delight at her presence, then the 
illumination on his face when she gave him her 
breathless message. There would be just time to 
deliver it, if he was to catch the midnight train. 
The letter she would slip into the letter-box. It 
would be found after she had left. If it was for- 
warded to him the next day, so much the better. 

She loved him. It was a new, wild sensation 
to her. The gradual drifting towards the rapids 
had been pleasant, though not unaccompanied by 
certain trepidations and misgivings. This even.- 


II 6 THE DEMAGOG UE AND LADY PHAYRE 

ing had brought her to the edge, and the swirl 
fascinated her. Tor once Lady Phayre had lost 
her head. And yet there was method in her 
wildness. She felt herself worshipped, longed 
for, saw the man standing in passionate helpless- 
ness on the other side of the social gap between 
them. It was her prerogative to stretch the 
bridge across. In the midst of all the excite- 
ment, Lady Phayre was deliciously conscious that 
she was doing it gracefully. 

Her mind was blissfully unheedful of the 
route. Crowded thoroughfares, dreary squares, 
long, gaunt streets — it was all the same to her. 
She lay hack in a corner of the cab, felt the 
letter stiff against her bosom, beneath her seal- 
skin jacket, and surrendered herself to her sensa- 
tions. They were those of an angel of mercy 
committing a rapturous . indiscretion. 

At last the cab stopped at the given number 
of the quiet street where Goddard lived. Bidding 
the cabman wait, she ran up the steps and rang 
the bell. For a moment she hesitated with the 
letter in her hand, fingering it nervously. Then, 
with a little throb, half-joy, half-fear, she thrust 
it into the letter-box. 

A servant came to the door and stared at the 
visitor. Lady Phayre’s heart beat so fast that 
she could scarcely speak. 

“Mr. Goddard’s upstairs, ma’am. I’ll fetch 
him,” said the servant ; and she ran up the stairs, 
leaving Lady Phayre standing in the hall. 

She was a slatternly slip of a girl, in a print 


LADY PHAYRE THROWS HER CAP 1 1 7 

dress. The thought of men’s incapacity in the 
domestic economies brought a superior smile to 
Lady Phayre’s lips. She forgave him, on account 
of his sex, for being left to wait in a draughty 
passage. But the dining-room door was ajar, 
showing a light within. There was no reason 
against her entering, her hand was upon it, when 
it was suddenly opened wide, and, in the full 
light appeared the figure of a woman with 
sodden features, dull eyes, and loose, untidy hair, 
dressed in a dirty flannel dressing-gown. 

For a second they stood watching one another. 
Then the woman made a step, and reeled side- 
ways against the wall. She was drunk. 

“ Who the are you ? ” she cried in a thick 

voice. 

Lady Phayre was transfixed with horror. She 
shrank back, just as Goddard rushed down 
the stairs. He had heard his wife’s speech. It 
was an awful moment. At the sight of him the 
woman cowered. 

“ Stay in that room ! ” he thundered at her ; 
then he slammed the door, and still gripping 
the knob, stood with livid features and heavily 
coming breath, staring into Lady Phayre’s white 
face. 

“You here? What madness brought you?” 
he said hoarsely. 

The sound of his voice addressing her was an 
awakening shock to Lady Phayre. 

“ Ah ! ” she exclaimed, the disgust and revolt 
of her soul finding its only expression in an 


1 1 8 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

inarticulate cry. And then she instinctively fled 
towards the street door. 

But Goddard overtook her in two or three 
great strides. She shrank into the corner, put 
up her hand as if he were about to touch her. 

“ Let me go. Don’t come near me. Don’t 
speak to me. It is horrible. ” 

“ Yes, it ’s horrible, ” he replied fiercely. “ But 
it is my curse and not my fault that I have a 
wife like that. ” 

“ Your wife, your wife ? ” she said in a queer, 
faint voice. “ That — that woman your wife ? ” 

“ You did not think it was my mistress ? ” he 
exclaimed with bitter coarseness. “To come to 
her after leaving you ! ” 

She recovered her composure with a strong 
effort. 

“ I will trouble you to open that door for me. ” 

He slid back the latch, held the door open for 
her to pass out, followed her, and, shutting it 
behind him, stood with her on the steps. Then, 
before she had time to descend, he seized her 
by the wrist. 

“ What madness made you come to this house ? 
Tell me. ” 

Her first impulse was to wrench herself free 
and rush down to the waiting cab, so as to fly 
from the loathed spot, and be alone with her 
sickening mortification. But he held her too 
firmly. 

“ Tell me, ” he said again sternly. “ You would 
not come here without some good reason. ” 


LADY PHAYRE THROWS HER CAP lig 


“ Let go my arm. You are hurting me. ” 

“ Forgive me, ” he said, in a softer tone, drop- 
ping her wrist. “ The hell of indoors followed 
me out here. ” 

Lady Phayre at that moment hated him in- 
tensely. If it had been a mere personal service 
to him, rather than perform it she would have 
called to her safe-conduct into the cab the 
policeman who was pacing the solitary, wind- 
swept street. But she reflected on the gravity 
of the issue. Mastering her repugnance, she told 
him in a few curt sentences the object of her 
mission. The longing for escape tingled through 
every fibre in her body. As soon as the last word 
of the hated task was spoken, she shuddered, flew 
down the steps, and rushed into the cab. 

At the door of Queen’s Court Mansions, after 
she had paid her fare, her heart stood still 
with a sickening recollection. She had left the 
letter behind in the box. For a moment she 
thought of driving back to claim it; but that 
was impossible. She crawled up the stairs and 
went to bed, her brain reeling with rage, disgust, 
and humiliation. 

Goddard stood bareheaded on the steps till the 
cab had disappeared in the darkness, and then 
let himself in with his latch-key. He went into 
the dining-room. Lizzie, lying half asleep on the 
couch by the fire, turned her glazed eyes towards 
him as he entered. Her hair was squalidly loose, 
her face bloated, her figure shapeless, her dirty 
dressing-gown half open, her stockings wrinkling 


20 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 


around her ankles. The room smelt of spirits ; 
the furniture was awry ; the table-cloth was 
askew, and on it were crumbs of a half-eaten 
Bath bun, a dirty handkerchief, and a copy of 
a penny novelette, lying open at a great stain 
of grease. 

A wave of indescribable loathing passed 
through the man. A savage desire leaped from 
his heart to snatch the sofa-cushion from under 
her and stifle her with it as she lay there, but it 
ended in a great lump in his throat. 

“ I told you to go to bed, ” he said fiercely. 
“ Go at once. ” 

She rose to her feet and staggered, unable to 
walk. If she had fallen to the ground, Goddard 
felt that he could not have touched her. She 
dropped back on the couch. He rang the bell 
and the girl appeared. 

“ Call cook and put your mistress to bed at 
once. I am going hack to Ecclesby to-night. 
I don’t know how long I shall be away. I shall 
wire to Mrs. Smith to come here to-morrow. ” 

The girl went out to fetch the cook. Lizzie 
looked at him with stupid gravity. 

“ Think I believe you ’re a-going to Ecclesby ? 
You ’re going to that Piccadilly Circus woman. ” 

Goddard sprang forward, caught her by the 
loose collar of her dressing gown, and shook her till 
the stuff tore. 

“ Do you want me to kill you ? ” he said, 
between his teeth, glaring at her. 

She was frightened, and began to whimper. 


LADY PHAYRE THROWS HER CAP 12 1 

Goddard stood for a moment looking at her. 
Then he passed his hand through his hair in a 
passionate gesture. 

“ 0 God ! * he cried, in a low, trembling voice, 
and then strode out of the room. 

He sought mechanically his still unpacked bag, 
his overcoat and necessaries, and went out into 
the night. At St. Pancras Station he found 
Gleam waiting on the platform. He was con- 
scious of the Member asking him for certain ex- 
planations concerning the Midland Grand Hotel 
and Lady Phayre, and of listening to details of 
the leakage of secrets, Rosenthal’s defection, to 
congratulations, encouragement, adieux as the 
train moved off, but it was all a phantasma- 
goria in which his intellect worked independently 
of himself. The glorious news he was carrying, 
the certain victory that was to crown his hopes 
and ambitions, the thousands of lives whose 
destiny he was bearing in his hands — all loomed 
like vague shadows at the back of his conscious- 
ness. But his brain was on fire with passionate 
love for Lady Phayre, and wild hatred of the 
woman from whom he had just parted. If man 
ever carried the fires of hell in his heart it was 
Goddard, that night, as he was on his way to 
realise the first great ambition of his life. 


CHAPTER XI 


RECONSTRUCTION 

The victory was complete. The sudden collapse 
of the firms caused a sensation all over the 
country. The newspapers were ringing with his 
name. He was the hero of the hour. At 
Ecclesby he was the hero for all time. His first 
appearance after the announcement of the terms 
of settlement was a signal for extravagant demon- 
stration. Men shouted themselves hoarse, and 
fought to shake hands with him. Women wept 
upon each other’s necks and shrilled out blessings. 
One, mad with joy, threw her arms around him 
and kissed him. A torch-light procession, headed 
by two frenzied bands, playing “ See the Con- 
quering Hero comes,” carried him in triumph 
through the streets. 

For the time his heart glowed with the 
intoxication of success and popular worship. 
But when the shouts of the crowd had ceased 
ringing in his ears, the glow faded like a false 
glamour, and left him face to face with grim 
realities, before which all else seemed shadowy. 
As soon as he reached London, he went with 
whirling thoughts to Queen’s Court Mansions. 
What he should say to Lady Phayre he did not 


RE CONS TR UCTION 


123 


know. All that he had defined was a fierce 
hunger to see her again, a wild longing to throw 
himself at her feet. The dormant passion of 
the man had awakened and shook him to the 
depths of his nature. His love for her had 
flowed so calmly, had quickened so imper- 
ceptibly, had maintained so smooth a surface 
with passionate depths so unsuspected, that when 
the sudden chasm metlts course, it dashed down 
an overwhelming cataract that swept him head- 
long into unknown abysses. The blood swirled 
through his veins as he stood waiting outside 
the familiar door. The servant opened it. Lady 
Phayre was unwell, was not receiving any 
visitors. 

“ Is she in bed ? ” asked Daniel rudely. 

“ She is keeping her room, sir. ” 

“ Tell her that I wish to see her. ” 

The servant retired, and returned with the 
message that Lady Phayre could not possibly 
receive, and would not be well enough to do 
so for some time. He had to depart, raging 
with disappointment. He went home, shut him- 
self up in his room, and wrote to her. The days 
passed, and he received no reply. A second 
letter met with similar treatment. Then he 
called again. This time neither the electric bell 
nor the little brass knocker caused the door to 
be opened. At the entrance to the Mansions 
he met the porter, who told him that Lady 
Phayre had locked up her flat for six months, 
and had gone to the south of France. 

Then, and then only, did Godftard realise his 


124 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PH A YR E 

lost paradise. He had been buoyed up with 
hopes that if he could hut have speech with her 
he could win his pardon, his right of entry into 
the bit-over of Eden that she inhabited. How 
she had closed the gates. If' the porter had 
been the angel of the flaming sword, Goddard 
could not have looked at him with more hopeless 
acquiescence. 

He wandered for some time aimlessly through 
the streets. Life seemed as drear as the murky 
November afternoon that was merging into a 
wet, dismal night. He had finished his routine 
duties for the day, had hurried through them 
feverishly in view of his visit to Lady Pliayre. 
He walked on to Piccadilly Circus. There he 
stopped, debated for a moment what he should 
do. A Bayswater ’bus had just drawn up at 
the end of the lumbering line, and the con- 
ductor was vociferating loudly. He shouted into 
Goddard’s face — 

“ Now, then ! Nottin’ ’111, sir. Eoom inside. ” 

Goddard turned away quickly. He could not 
go home. The thought of Lizzie, foul and 
drunken, caused a red cloud to pass before his 
eyes. In his present mood it would be well 
not to see her. 

He made his way to his club, mounted to the 
quiet library, where he would be undisturbed 
by the chatter of acquaintances, and pulling up 
an arm-chair before a fire-place in a dark corner, 
gave himself up- to the grim task of reconstruct- 
ing his life. A new devastating element had 


RE CONS TR UC TION 


125 


come into his sphere — Lizzie. In the days 
before his friendship with Lady Pliayre his wife 
had counted for little in his earnest life. He 
regretted her unhappiness, did what lay in his 
power to remedy the irremediable mistake of 
his marriage; but never desiring freedom, the 
bond scarcely troubled him. Even during the 
sweetness of his intercourse with Lady Phayre 
it had galled him but little. She was so far 
above him, the feelings with which he regarded 
her were so new to his almost original experience 
that he had not realised that he loved her after 
the common way of men. In the serenity of 
Lady Phayre’ s atmosphere Lizzie counted for 
no more than the little bare top -room in which 
he had once lived, his early memories of hard- 
ship and struggle with poverty. But now when 
the idyll was over, when he felt the man’s fierce 
passion for the woman that was lost to him, the 
other woman who stood between counted as a 
terrible, resistless force. 

He gazed with set features into the fire. It 
faded, and in its place rose the scene of that 
night when the two women had met. One face 
noble, intellectual, pure in outline; the other, 
sodden, coarse, and bestial. He gripped the arms 
of his chair, and a half groan came from his lips. 
A loathing of the woman to whom he was bound 
arose within him like a nausea. 

Then anger shook him — anger at the folly of 
his marriage; anger at the coarse nature of his 
wife, at her father’s drunkenness, at the pretty 


126 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 


baby face that had caught his raw fancy — anger, 
too, at Lady Phayre. Why had she sought him 
out? Why had she lured him on to enslave 
himself to her ? Anger at her scorn of him, at 
her fine-lady sensitiveness that was revolted at 
the sight of a drunken shrew. Anger at her 
having led him into the fool’s paradise only to 
eject him ignominiously. 

A slight tap on his shoulder aroused him. He 
started round : the anger that was hot within him 
turned against the disturber. It was Gleam. 

“ I have been looking round the club for some 
one to dine with. Come along,” he said in his 
friendly way. 

But Goddard glowered at him. At that mo- 
ment Gleam seemed to belong to the other side 
of the great gulf, and he hated him with the 
old class-hatred. He looked so spick and span 
with his evening-dress, and gold eye-glass, and 
meticulously trimmed head. His manner was so 
easy, giving the impression of freedom from sor- 
did cares. He had no foul drunken wife drag- 
ging him down. He could meet Lady Phayre on 
a level. He could offer her marriage, and she 
could but take the offer as a compliment. A 
sense of personal degradation filled Goddard’s 
soul, and he hated himself for hating Gleam. 
In a moment, however, he came to his senses, 
but not before Gleam had rallied him on his 
confusion. 

“ Caught you napping, eh ? Well — will you 
dine ? ” 


RECONSTR UCTION 


1 27 


“No,” said Goddard, rising from his chair. 
“ Not to-night. I ought to have got out of this 
half-an-hour ago. ” 

He made a pretence of stretching himself as 
if he had been asleep. Gleam looked at him with 
his quick glance. 

“ You have been overworking yourself. Take 
care. You great strong men break with a crash. 
Go away and have a rest. ” 

“ Like Lady Phayre, ” said Goddard, in the 
bitterness of his heart. 

“ Quite so. That confounded strike of yours 
did for her. What the dickens we ’re to do with- 
out her I don’t know. ” 

“ Life will go on just the same, I suppose. No 
one is indispensable. ” 

He laughed mirthlessly. A faint flush rose 
in Gleam’s dry cheeks. 

“ You ’re talking treason, Goddard. You cer- 
tainly do want a rest. ” 

“ One wants a devil of a lot of things one can’t 
get, ” said Goddard. 

“ I want my dinner, and I ’m going to get 
it,” replied Gleam good-humouredly. “Good- 
bye. ” 

He went out of the library, took his place 
in the lift. His eyes twinkled, and he smoothed 
his moustache abstractedly. Then a little excla- 
mation broke from him. 

“ I wonder ! ” said he. 

“ Did you speak, sir ? ” said the lift-porter. 

“ Eh ? ” replied Gleam. “ Yes ; I wonder — I 


128 THE DEMAGOG HE AND LADY PHAYRE 

wonder why I have come down to the basement 
when I wanted the dining-room floor. ” 

But Goddard could not sit any longer in the 
library. The brooding spell was over, and its 
place was taken by feverish unrest. He left the 
Club, went out into the streets, and began to 
walk rapidly. Whither was he going ? He did 
not care. A vague idea that he could free him- 
self of his madness by physical exercise prompted 
him. He had a faint recollection of a scene in a 
penny dreadful read in his board-school days — 
a scene where the hero, to bring calmness to his 
throbbing brain, mounted his horse and galloped 
at whirlwind speed over miles and miles of moor- 
land, in frenzied chase, until the noble animal’s 
heart burst and he staggered and fell, throwing 
his rider, who broke his neck. But Goddard 
walked — up the hurrying Strand and Fleet 
Street, through the fast-emptying City; east- 
wards, up Fenchurch Street, the Whitechapel 
Boad, Mile End Boad, jostling through the 
crowded thoroughfares that reeked with the 
odour of fried-fish, naphtha from costers’ bar- 
rows, and the day’s sweat of the toiling popula- 
tion ; down Whitehouse Lane and Stepney High 
Street on to Batcliffe Highway. The squalor 
and misery of it all touched the ever-responsive 
chord in his nature, awoke the demagogue in 
him to sympathy with the people. The East 
End had never appeared to him so terrible, so 
crushing in its vast unloveliness. Mile after mile 
it was just the same — the same stench, the same 


RE CONS TR UCTION 


129 


stunted men ; the same anemic girl-mothers ; the 
same foul, fringed, and feathered women of the 
street; the same bestial talk that seemed to 
hang continuously on the air; the same scenes 
of drunken brawling outside the public-houses ; 
the same dreamy, endless tram-cars, smoothly 
gliding past this hubbub and swelter of humanity 
on the pavement; and everywhere the same joy- 
less struggle for the four sole ends of life — food, 
raiment, shelter, and forgetfulness. 

Goddard felt a strange and stern comfort in 
steeping his soul in these wide waters of bitter- 
ness. He went on and on, through brawling compa- 
nies of sailors, swarthy Lascars, and the land-scum 
that clings round the seafaring life ; past evil- 
smelling marine stores, live-stock dealers disso- 
nant with the screeching of parrots, slop-shops, 
low eating-houses, scented from afar, even through 
the general stench, by the miasmic exhalations 
from basement gratings. At the end of the 
Highway he turned, retraced his steps, went 
through the foul river-side slums, crossed the 
Commercial Road, struck northwards, up dark, 
narrow streets, where the flare and turmoil of the 
great arteries were perceived but faintly, and the 
minor privacies of life were in sordid evidence. 
Through streets of sweaters’ dens he could see 
the vague forms of the workers behind the blind- 
less windows. Once he stopped and counted — 
thirty in one small, gas-lit room. 

To carry on the combat with the powers of 
evil that enthralled this hideous city, his life 
9 


130 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

needed little reconstruction. He thought of Lady 
Phayre, clenched his stick, and swung it furiously. 

“ I ’ll go on with my work, and she can go to 
the devil ! ” he said. 

And he walked on through the endless streets. 

It is a simple way to rid ourselves of burdens, 
to consign them to Avernus, and ship them on 
the waters of Lethe. Unfortunately it is not 
always successful. They are apt to be elusive, 
like the vampire in the Indian story which 
Vikram could not keep in his sack. They slip 
from the hold of the dark ship, and return to the 
shoulders of the consigner. But in this God- 
dard’s pride allowed no confession of failure. 
He blustered himself into the belief that Lady 
Phayre was no more to him than Hecuba was 
to the First Player, thus playing the hypocrite 
to himself with morose and stubborn futility. 
He plunged into his work with redoubled energy, 
grew angry when he found that it did not give 
him the old sufficing happiness, and obstinately 
refused to allow the simple, obvious cause. 

And then the new element of discord in his 
life had to be accepted and harmonised. Lizzie 
was going from bad to worse. He brought Emily 
to live in the house to take permanent charge of 
her. Together they tried to mitigate the evil, to 
circumvent her in her plans for obtaining drink ; 
hut she was more than their equal in cunning. 
The disease had laid its everlasting grasp upon 
her. She sank daily in degradation. Daniel 


RECONSTRUCTION 


131 

could not cheat himself into the fancy of free- 
dom from this burden of loathing. Yet he was a 
man with a keen sense of justice. The more his 
heart revolted, the more doggedly did he repress 
outward manifestation. He bore her reproaches 
silently, strove to render her lot less bitter. 

“ I believe you ’re an angel from heaven, 
Daniel,” said Emily once. She always had 
looked up to him with reverential adoration. 
“ How you can put up with her I don’t know. 
You ’re a living angel if ever there was one.” 

“ You think so, do you, Em. ? ” he answered 
with a rough laugh, rather touched. “ Well, go 
on thinking so. It won’t do me any harm.” 

Only once did Lizzie refer to the night of Lady 
Phayre’s visit. It was a Sunday evening. Emily 
had gone to church, and had left the two together 
in the drawing-room. Daniel was smoking a 
pipe over a book, and Lizzie was engaged with 
some needlework — a rare occupation. She had 
been less fretful that day, had even asked him to 
sit with' her. Gradually, as Daniel read, her 
efforts with her needle became spasmodic. There 
were intervals of gazing into the fire, and sudden 
resumptions of industry. Then she rose, moved 
about the- room, idly examining nicknacks and 
fidgeting with furniture. At last she left the 
room, and entered her bedroom that adjoined. 

Suddenly Daniel’s attention was arrested by a 
sharp tinkling sound. He started to his feet and 
went quickly to join Lizzie. It was as he had 
suspected. By the half-light of the dim-burning 


132 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

gas he saw her thrusting a bottle beneath some 
garments in a trunk. A glass half full of spirits 
was close by on the mantelpiece. 

“ Lizzie ! How can you ? ” he cried. 

She turned upon him in a fury. 

“How dare you come in here! How dare 
you spy upon me ! If I want to drink I ’ll 
drink. What business is it of yours if I kill 
myself ? ” 

She seized the glass, had already put it to her 
lips, wdien he strode forward and dashed it from 
her hand. 

“ You won’t do it to-night anyhow, Lizzie,” he 
said calmly. 

She broke into a torrent of angry speech. 

When the drink or passion was upon her, she 
used the vernacular of the Sunington streets — 
of her own home, for the matter of that. He 
waited until there was a lull in the tempest. 

“ I ’ll have the bottle anyway,” he said, turning 
to the trunk. 

But that was the signal for a fresh outburst. 
She sat upon the trunk, swore he should never 
have it while she lived, prepared to defend her 
property by physical means. Goddard shrugged 
his shoulders, and sat down upon the bed. 

“ All right,” he said : “ I ’ll wait.” 

Then she burst into hysterical sobbing. She 
wished she was dead. She hated him. He 
was a brute. That was all he lived for — to keep 
the spy upon her when he was n’t making up to 
other women. 


RE CONS TR UCTIOAT 


133 


“ Do you think I ’m a fool ? ” she cried, sud- 
denly taking her hands from her face and turning 
to him. “Do you think I don’t know ? I don’t 
interfere with you: why should you interfere 
with me ? Only don’t bring your women to this 
house. Do you think I don’t know your goings 
on ? You are worse than I am. I don’t pre- 
tend. You are a dirty blackguard. You think 
I don’t know all about your Rhodanthes and 
things ? ” 

He started as if she had struck him, for a 
moment lost the command over himself that he 
had maintained through all the ordure of words. 
He regained it with a violent effort, clutching 
the counterpane fiercely, until his finger-nails 
were turned back. He understood now how a 
man could beat a woman. If he lost the hold 
over himself, he would rush to her and beat her 
— beat her until she lay senseless. Perhaps she 
almost expected it, for she paused at the last 
words, and looked at him half-coweringly, half* 
defiantly. So their eyes remained fixed on one 
another in the dim-lit room. Then she shud- 
dered with body and lips, and uttering a low cry 
hid her face. A terror had taken possession of 
her. She was conquered. 

Daniel rose from the bed, went to her, and 
took her by the arm. 

“ Go into the next room,” he said sternly, and 
she obeyed. 

He joined her after he had disposed of the 
disputed whisky-bottle. And there they sat in 


134 THE demagogue and lady phayre 

an appalling silence, until Emily came back from 
church, and relieved him of his charge. 

That was the last time that Lizzie referred 
to Lady Phayre. He wondered how she had 
learned her name — that name Khodanthe, which 
he had ever in his mind — which, save this once, 
he had never heard uttered aloud. It was a 
curious freak of fate’s irony that, on this one 
occasion, it should have been uttered by his 
wife’s lips. The circumstance embittered him 
still more against her. 

A few weeks after this the long-expected 
vacancy in the Hough division occurred, and 
Goddard was definitely chosen as the Eadical 
candidate. In the very beginning of his elec- 
toral campaign he received news from London 
that the terrible drink illness had fallen upon 
his wife. 


CHAPTER XII 


A LEADER OF MEN 

“ Do you think it wise for me to go in ? ” asked 
Goddard. 

“ She has been asking for you,” said the nurse. 
“ It may do her good ; but don’t speak to her.” 

“ Then she has definitely turned the corner.” 

“ Yes ; at last. But her recovery depends 
upon absolute quiet. It is the heart now. A 
sudden excitement, and then ” — she snapped her 
fingers — “ syncope.” 

“ That is to say — sudden death.” 

“ Of course,” said the nurse. 

“ I shall merely sit by her side for ten minutes,” 
said Daniel. “ You are sure it will please her ? ” 

“ It will be a sign of forgiveness,” said the 
nurse. She sighed. “ Ah ! poor thing ! I ’ll go 
and prepare her.” 

Goddard sat down wearily in the stiffly fur- 
nished drawing-room to await his summons, and 
rested his head in his hands. He was very 
tired. The strain, mental and physical, of the 
past three months had told upon him. His 
face was worn and yellow, and his eyes were 
rather too bright for health. A strange thing 
for him, he had been driven to seek medical 


136 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

advice for insomnia. The prescription was im- 
mediate rest and change. He shrugged his 
shoulders. After the election, perhaps. 

Intense political feeling prevailed in the 
division. Goddard’s influence was such as to 
leave none lukewarm. The conflict was raging 
fiercely. One of the heaviest polls on record 
was anticipated. The strain of candidature 
would have been great in ordinary circumstances. 
Coming as it did upon an already over- worked 
man, it was dangerous. And then there was 
Lizzie’s illness. He had already come to town 
several times to satisfy himself that all was being 
done for her that money and skill could accom- 
plish. It had been a matter of feverish anxiety 
lest any act of omission on his part should en- 
danger her recovery. 

He sat with his head in his hands, staring at 
the pattern of the carpet, too tired to think 
coherently. To-morrow was polling day. He 
would have to get back that evening. By the 
registers he ought to get in. “Daniel Goddard, 
M.P.” — a name to conjure with in a few years’ 
time. And yet there was something missing. 
He knew what it was only too well. It might 
have been. He would have seen her in Hough 
to-morrow — eager, radiant, driving about the 
polling-booths, wearing his colours. And if he 
won — the joy of standing before her in his 
victory ! But the other picture rose up before 
him. All through the election he had been 
haunted by the two women. He had wrestled 


A LEADER OF MEN 


13 7 


with passionate desires. One night, when news 
had come that Lizzie lay between life and death, 
a horrible, overwhelming longing that she might 
die had kept him awake till the morning, when 
he rose and took the first train to town, to 
assure himself that no stone was being left un- 
turned in order to save her. He remembered 
now some of Emily’s descriptions of the horrors 
of that bedside, and he shivered. Thank God it 
was over. She wanted to see him. Perhaps this 
might mark a change in their lives. He wondered 
whether she knew anything of the election. Per- 
haps she might take a pride in being the wife 
of a member of Parliament. But what good 
could it do her ? It would not bring fresh inter- 
ests into her life. Yes, it was hopeless. Any 
common woman in the street would be as fit a 
companion for him. And again the longing for 
the companionship he had lost came upon him, 
and his thoughts, in his weary mood, lingered 
over the witchery of her odd name — Eliodanthe. 

“ I am sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr. 
Goddard, ” said the nurse, coming in. “ There 
were some odds and ends to do in the room. 
You ’ll be very, very quiet, won’t you ? ” 

“ You are sure there is no danger ? ” asked 
Goddard. 

The nurse smiled at his insistence. 

“ Don’t speak to her or make her talk. That 
is all, ” she said. 

Goddard entered the sick-room on tiptoe. At 
the door Emily met him on her way out, and 


138 THE DEMAGOG UE AND LADY PHAYRE 


whispered a caution not to stay too long. He 
went to the bedside. Lizzie was lying very still 
and white. The flesh had left her cheeks ; they 
were pinched, her features sharp, the skin drawn 
away tight against the bones. Her colourless lips 
hung loose ; her teeth were prominent — a death’s 
head rather than a living woman. Goddard was 
shocked to the heart. He scarcely recognised her. 
Not only did he fail to see in her any traces of 
the girl he had once thought to love, hut also 
she was no longer the woman he had hated. 

“ So you ’ve come, ” she whispered, moving a 
feeble hand. 

He took it in his, tried to smile to reassure her. 
Her lips moved again. 

“ Won’t you kiss me ? ” 

Her voice had not changed. It lessened the 
strange sense of unfamiliarity with which he had 
been regarding her. There was an involuntary 
touch of peevishness in the tone. He bent down 
and kissed her cheek. , 

“ Make haste and get well, Lizzie, ” he said in 
a low voice. 

She seemed satisfied with this, for she half 
closed her eyes, and let her hand slip from his on 
to the counterpane. Daniel sat down in the chair 
facing the small table by the bedside, on which 
were a bottle of medicine and glass, a bunch of 
violets in water, and her Bible. This last was a 
beautifully bound volume, edged with brass, and 
closed with a heavy clasp. Daniel had given it 
to her in the early days of their marriage, when 


A LEADER OF MEN 


139 


she was eager to surround herself with all the 
obvious essentials of gentility. He had learned 
lately from Emily’s chatter how she had in- 
sisted upon this Bible being placed near her. 

“ As if the Holy Book could charm away the 
other things, ” Emily had said in an awed tone. 

The sight of it carried his thoughts back. 
Only once before had he sat by her side like this — 
in this very room, too. She had been very white 
and still then, but young and fresh, with glad- 
ness in her eyes that had awakened within him an 
answering thrill. And there had been a little wee 
pink thing at her breast. It had fluffy black 
down on its head, he remembered. In this 
room, too, it had died three years later of diph- 
theria. The room’s associations grew upon him. 
It was here that he had first come by the knowl- 
edge of the curse of her life. She was lying 
speechless one evening on the bed. He had bent 
over her unsuspectingly, and then started back 
with a horrible spasm of disgust. Involuntarily 
now he raised his head and looked at her. Her 
eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. His fancy 
seemed to read in them the lingering horrors 
through which she had passed. He shuddered, 
thanked God that the child had died. The here- 
ditary poison must have lurked in its young 
veins. 

To shake off these thoughts he rose, stirred the 
fire into a blaze, and returned to his seat. Then, 
moved by compunction — for this was a visit of for- 
giveness — he stretched out his arm and smoothed 


140 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

the back of her hand. A look of gratefulness 
appeared on her face, and she closed her eyes again. 
Daniel’s heart softened a little towards her. 

The minutes passed slowly. He grew restless, 
wished that the nurse or Emily would come and 
relieve him. A sick-room, where one has to sit 
perfectly still, is not the place for a man suffering 
from nervous excitement. His eyes fell again on 
the Bible. He had not seen his gift for years. 
There was a certain pathos in her desire to have 
it near her. 

He took it up, undid the clasp, and looked at 
the fly-leaf. “To my dear wife. ” He sighed. 
He had tried to delude himself in those days 
that he loved her. Could he ever write such an 
inscription again? He shook his head, as the 
ever-haunting face of the other woman came 
between his eyes and the leaf. He turned the 
pages. They fell open, naturally, where a letter 
had been placed. The back of the envelope was 
turned to him. He thought it was one of his 
own to his wife, and felt touched by the idea of 
her keeping it there. He took it up curiously, 
but as his glance fell on the address he started 
with great amazement. It was in Lady Phayre’s 
handwriting — bore only his name. It had been 
opened. He himself surely had never received 
such a letter. With heart furiously beating and 
trembling fingers, he drew out the enclosure. 

“ Go, my hero and leader of men, to your 
victory. And if you love me, come back to me 
for your reward — whatsoever your heart desireth. 

“ Rhodanthe. ” 


A LEADER OF MEN 


141 

For a few moments he remained staring at the 
paper, unable to comprehend. Then the truth 
crashed down upon him — both the letter’s signi- 
ficance and the probable history of its miscarriage. 
His brain reeled. She loved him. The note of 
passion in the words drowned his senses like a 
great diapason. She loved him. But for this 
other woman she would be his. He rose from 
his chair, turning his back to his wife, and put 
his hand to his forehead. His instinct was to 
fiy from her presence. The smouldering hatred had 
sprung into fierce flame. He made a few steps 
by the foot of the bed, then stopped and looked 
at her. Their eyes met. He saw that she had 
been following his movements from the time he 
had first opened the Bible. A wave of gathering 
madness clouded his brain, surged red before his 
eyes. Remaining sanity bade him rush from the 
room if she was to live. An explosion of his 
passion would kill her. But the expression of 
excitement and fear on her peaked, livid face 
read in his disordered brain as one of mocking 
triumph. It swept away the lingering self-con- 
trol. He strode round to her side, lifted his arms 
above his head, clenching the letter and shaking 
with passion, let loose all the fury in his soul in 
a low, hoarse cry. 

Lizzie rose to a sitting posture, gazed at him 
for a moment, an awful terror in her eyes, and 
then, with a gasp, fell back on her pillow — dead. 

How long he stood there, as if petrified, he 
never knew. When he recovered reason he wiped 


142 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

the great drops of perspiration from his forehead, 
thrust the letter into his pocket, and rushed from 
the room. 

“ Emily ! Nurse ! ” he shouted from the top 
of the landing; and when they appeared hur- 
riedly from the dining-room, “ Come up at once : 
I think Lizzie is dead. ” 

The women ran up the stairs. 

“ Go to her. I will fetch Dr. Carson, ” he cried, 
brushing past them. 

He caught up a hat from the hall, and in 
another moment was out of doors. This pretext 
for absence and solitude was an inspiration. She 
was dead. He was free. He had killed her. He 
did not notice that an icy, heavy rain was sweep- 
ing the streets. He had killed her for Kho- 
ilanthe. Ehodanthe was his : he had bought her 
with his soul. He bit his lips to prevent himself 
from crying aloud. The rare passers-by turned 
round scared at his wild face and furious gait. 

The calm of the doctor’s waiting-room was 
a check, and allowed him to concentrate his 
scattered faculties. When the medical man ap- 
peared, alert and matter of fact, he w T as master 
of himself. He explained his errand. He had 
been sitting with his wife, had idly reached for 
her Bible by the bedside. She had sprung up 
to prevent him. The exertion had killed her. 
He had looked through the Bible, found a letter 
written to him which she had guarded through 
jealousy. The explanation was simple and satis- 
factory, yet he felt deadly faint. 


A LEADER OF MEN 


143 


“ You are upset, ” said Dr. Carson, who had 
known him for several years. “ You have been 
burning the candle at both ends lately. Drink 
this while I go and put on my coat. ” He poured 
him out a glass of brandy, which he took from a 
cupboard. Goddard gulped it down neat. The 
spirit saved him from the threatening collapse 
and braced his nerves. 

He accompanied the doctor to his own house 
in silence, left him at the dining-room door to 
go upstairs to the bedroom, and entering, sat 
down to wait. When the doctor returned, it 
was with a great effort that Goddard compelled 
himself to look him in the eyes. 

“ I am afraid your wife is dead, ” said the 
doctor gravely. 

“ And I am indirectly the cause, ” said Goddard. 

The other moved a deprecating hand. “ Don’t 
let that add to your sadness. Any other chance 
accident might have done it. Besides, may 
I speak to you frankly ? ” 

“ By all means. ” 

“ Then — if it will not pain you — it is better 
so. ” 

“ Would she never have recovered ? ” 

“ Her health was shattered. In all probability 
she would have broken out again. She and you 
have been spared some years of certain misery. ” 

“ Then I have done a good action from a 
philosophical point of view ? ” said Goddard with 
a harsh laugh. 

“ If you put it that way, you have, ” replied 
the doctor, somewhat stiffly. 


144 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

“ Look here, Carson, ” cried Goddard excitedly. 
“ I can’t tell you that I am grieved she has gone. 
Don’t expect me to play the hypocrite. ” 

“ I expect nothing but the misfortune of having 
you upon my hands in a short time,” said the 
other. 

“ Then let me speak to you once and for all — 
as a medical man : I must speak to somebody. 
These last few weeks I have been in hell fire. 
I hated her. I wanted her to die. I used to 
wake up at nights wet through with sweat, 
through the terror of it. I have been to blame 
throughout from the first cursed day I married 
her. I didn’t love her ; she did n’t care much for 
me. I had to go my way : she could n’t follow 
me. How could she ? She was left alone here 
all by herself — no company, no occupations — 
nothing. You know her history — her father. 
The drink was in her blood. I tried to save 
her — after my fashion. You, who have attended 
her for the last eight years, can bear me out. 
But we were strangers — not an impulse in com- 
mon. Latterly — listen : I must tell some one 
once, or I shall go mad. I knew what a woman 
could be — what it was to want a woman pas- 
sionately, madly. She came here one night, 
discovered I was married — saw my wife drunk 
in this room. Since then my wife has been like 
an incubus throttling me, dragging me down to 
damnation. And I wanted her to die. In that 
room upstairs, an hour ago, when I kissed her 
and forgave her, I wanted her to die. When 


A LEADER OF MEN 


145 

the moment came it was as though I had mur- 
dered her. Tell me, what am I to think ? What 
am I to do ? ” 

His features were working strangely, his brow 
damp with the black hair straggling across it. 
He looked at Carson with a searching appeal 
in his eyes. The latter took his hand, felt his 
pulse. 

“ What you are to do, ” he said, “is to go to 
bed at once and sleep. I T1 send you round a 
draught. What you are to think, when you 
wake up, is that you are not responsible for her 
death — that she might have died at any moment, 
that it is better to die than to live a life of 
misery ; that you are a free man, young, with all 
that makes life worth living in front of you. 
And lastly, if you like, that I have forgotten 
all you have told me. Now, go to bed and stay 
there. ” 

“ Impossible, ” cried Goddard. “ The elec- 
tion. ” 

“ Damn the election ! ” said the doctor. 

“ I must go back to-day. ” 

“ And — ? " 

“ I ’ll make the arrangements, ” replied Goddard 
with a shiver. “ To-day is Tuesday. It will be 
for Friday. The poll will be declared at latest 
on Thursday morning. I must be there. Man 
alive ! ” he cried, with a queer tremor in his voice. 
“I cannot stay in this house! It would drive 
me mad. To sit here doing nothing — nothing — 
only thinking. I must go back. It will occupy 
10 


146 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 

my mind. There are two women in this house — 
the dead one who is living, and the living one 
who is dead — has been dead to me. If ever 
action and stimulus have been necessary to me, 
they are imperative now. I must do it, man, I 
tell you — I must do it. ” 

He began to walk about the room in a state 
of restless excitement, now and then moistening 
his lips with his tongue, and passing his hand 
through his hair. Dr. Carson reasoned with him. 
He was a young man, and felt himself powerless 
before Goddard’s stronger personality. By virtue 
of mere professional prestige you cannot force 
a man to follow your prescriptions. Goddard 
impetuously swept aside his arguments. At 
last he stopped short, as if struck by a sudden 
inspiration. 

“ I tell you what, Carson, I ’ll promise to start 
at once for the south of France, as soon as this 
miserable business is over, and not do a stroke of 
work for a month. ” 

“ That ’s the only sensible thing you have said 
to-day, ” returned the other, more cheerily. 
“ You ’d better let me see you again before you 
go.” 

They parted. Goddard stumbled heavily up- 
stairs to his own room, threw himself on the bed, 
and lay there, holding his burning head in his 
hands. 

And Emily sat in the death-chamber and cried, 
the only soul on the wide earth who had love for 


A LEADER OF MEN 


147 


the poor, wrecked creature that was dead, for 
Sophie, her sister, had never had a word of good 
to say on Lizzie’s behalf. She alone knew and 
pitied the miserable tragedy of that poor, futile 
life. 


CHAPTER XIII 


THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER 

The Paris-Lyons express was speeding through 
the darkness. It was intensely cold. The two 
other occupants of the carriage were shiver ingly 
asleep beneath their rugs. But Goddard was 
awake, tinglingly awake, yet unconscious of ex- 
ternal things. 

He was passing through one of those rare 
epochs in life when a man feels himself to be 
master of his fate. Ever since he had seen the 
Dover Cliffs fading out of sight, and with them 
the last troubling impressions of a late graveside, 
he had been strung with a sense of invincibility. 
Nothing in his life that he had ardently desired 
had not been accomplished. He had but to will 
a thing, and it was done. He had conquered 
his position, step by step, with never a failure — 
his reputation as a popular leader, his respon- 
sible position in the Progressive League, his seat 
on the London County Council, his standing 
as an economic writer, his prestige at Ecclesby, 
and now his seat in Parliament. He had been 
returned by a triumphant majority. The vic- 
tory intoxicated him — that and the elation of 
freedom. In his exalted mood he saw himself 


THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER 1 49 

lifted above the moral conventions of men. The 
death of his wife seemed a part of his destiny of 
victory. He had scarcely been responsible. Blind 
fate had helped him, as it had done hitherto. 

And now he was on his way to the most 
glorious conquest of all. Every moment was 
bringing him nearer. To-morrow he would see 
Lady Phayre. His arms would be about her. 
She would yield herself to him. The new life 
would begin — great, glorious, wonderful. With 
her by his side there would be nothing impos- 
sible. The whole world should bless his name. 
He would make history. He would go down to 
posterity as the Great Demagogue. 

She would put her white arms about his neck, 
and her lips would cling to his. When the 
thought came, a flash of passion irradiated the 
whole man. 

He never doubted that he would win her. She 
loved him. The letter which he had read over a 
thousand times was overwhelming evidence. Her 
hurried flight from London also testified to the 
seriousness of the blow the discovery had been 
to her. He conjured up scenes and incidents in 
their past intercourse whose significance, unnoticed 
at the time, became sweetly plain in the light of 
his new knowledge. Nothing could stand in his 
way now. He was going to her, not a broken man 
humiliated with failure, as he had done on the 
last occasion he had sought her, but proud with 
name and fame, and the promise of great power 
in the land. 


150 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 


He had not written to her. His imagination 
was too much fired with the idea he had con- 
ceived of bursting upon her suddenly with the 
news of his freedom and with a passionate 
appeal. The vividness and excitement of the 
past few days had awakened the theatrical 
element in his nature — the dramatic instinct 
that lies in the nature of any great orator and 
leader of men. 

“ Lyons > dix minutes d’ arret ! ” 

Goddard left the compartment to stretch his 
legs. The great station loomed vast in the 
darkness of the mid- January morning. The 
tapping of the wheels echoed ghostly in the 
stillness. Only a few muffled forms had braved 
the cold, and were stamping their feet on the 
platform, or hurrying to the dimly lit buffet 
for the morning coffee. Nothing more delicious 
than this in the sweet spring dawn, but at five 
o’clock in mid-winter it requires an effort to 
leave the snugness of the compartment. To 
Goddard the journey was half dream, half de- 
light. The great train, standing, to his English 
eyes, monstrously high above the rails, seemed 
some strange engine appointed by fate to his 
service. It seemed symbolic of the irresistible 
force that he had at his command. 

When the train started again he tried to sleep, 
but his brain was too excited. He had not slept 
for three nights. Yet the feelings of prostration 
that had come upon him just before Lizzie’s 
death had passed away, giving place to one of 


THE CONCL US/ON OF THE WHOLE MA TTER I 5 I 

intense vitality. Every fibre in his body was 
alive. Sleep was scarcely necessary. Only a 
shooting pain now and then in his head made 
him start and pass his hand impatiently across 
his forehead. The train thundered on through 
the darkness, and Goddard remained awake, 
possessed by the passionate intensity of his 
fixed idea. He watched the day dawn, bright 
and glorious. At Avignon the world was bathed 
in sunshine. It was an omen of happiness. At 
Marseilles it was hot. All along that beautiful 
coast Goddard’s heart glowed within him. The 
deep-coloured sea, the flowers, the light, the 
joyousness of the south filled his senses with 
the wonder of a new world. His silent com- 
panions got out at Toulon, and three swarthy 
Gascons took their place, and talked with rich 
deep voices and extravagant gestures until they 
reached Carnoules, their destination. Goddard 
missed their whole-hearted laughter when they 
had gone. 

The day wore on. Cannes at four o’clock. 
In a few moments he would be in Nice. He 
drew once more the letter from his pocket, 
rested his eyes on the few words a long, long 
time. “ Whatsoever your heart desireth — Rho- 
danthe. ” He looked out at the deep blue water 
meeting the violet sky. Rhodanthe ! The 
name was strangely in harmony with this exotic 
beauty. Before the night was over he would 
call her by it. She would be his. Together 
they would conquer the world. 


152 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE 


He stepped on to the platform at Nice like 
a king coming to take possession of a new 
realm. He looked around, as if he should see 
Lady Phayre awaiting him, and then smiled at 
the fancy. The hotel porter took his luggage 
to the Hotel Terminus, the nearest. He was 
feverishly anxious to set out on his quest of 
her without loss of time. A quarter of an hour 
sufficed him to wash and make himself pre- 
sentable, and then he went out into the Avenue 
de la Gare. At another time he would have 
loved to walk down the beautiful boulevard, 
bright with shops and cafds and gaily coloured 
kiosques ; but now the supreme hour of his 
life had come, and the great thoroughfare be- 
came blurred as in a dream. He hailed a cab, 
gave the address “ Hotel des Anglais” to the 
driver, and sat bolt upright all the way, in an 
agony of impatience. He had no eyes now for 
the sea as he emerged on to the Promenade des 
Anglais ; but he scanned the long line of palace- 
hotels, wondering which was Lady Phayre’s. 
The cab stopped by the public gardens. Goddard 
looked up. It was the H6tel des Anglais. He 
threw a piece of money to the cabman, and 
entered. 

The frock-coated, brass-buttoned porter ap- 
proached him in polite inquiry. 

“ I want to see Lady Phayre, ” said Goddard. 

“ I am afraid, sir, ” replied the man, “ that 
Lady Phayre has gone away this very mom- 


THE CONCL USION OF THE WHOLE MA TTER 1 5 3 

“ Gone away ? ” asked Goddard, looking at him 
blankly. “ Where to ? ” 

“ Ah, that I cannot say, ” said the porter. 

And then he added, with the benevolent smile 
of his class — 

“ Perhaps you have not heard, sir, that there is 
no longer such a person as Lady Phayre. ” 

“ What ? ” cried Goddard. “ What do you 
mean ? ” 

“ Only that Madame was married this morning. 
It was to a Monsieur Gleam. I believe he is a 
member of Parliament. He has been staying in 
the hotel. ” 

Goddard stared at him with a ghastly face. 
He turned slowly and went down the hotel steps. 
He staggered a few yards. Then the sea, and 
the trees, and the great white palaces mingled 
together in a whirling circle, and disappeared in 
the blackness of night. Something in his brain 
seemed to snap, and he fell an inert mass on the 
pavement. 

For weeks he lay ill. He recovered to wish 
that he had died. Despair overwhelmed him. 
His crime haunted him waking and sleeping. In 
his bodily prostration he seemed to hear the 
mocking laughter of the fiend that had prompted 
it. With the torture of remorse was paradoxically 
mingled impotent anger at the cynicism of fate. 
His soul sickened at the futility of things. He 
shrank with shuddering dismay from the ordeal 
that lay before him. There were times when 
death beckoned to him with tempting hands. 


54 THE demagogue and lady phayre 


But men of Goddard’s stamp survive the ship- 
wreck of their happiness. They live on, and go 
about the world’s work doggedly, stubbornly, 
blindly obeying the fighting instinct within them. 
The great tragedies of the soul culminate not in 
death, but in dragging years of life, when the 
grasshopper is a burden and desire fails. And 
such is the end of Daniel Goddard’s tragedy. He 
lives to-day. His name is a household word. He 
is the coming man, not of a party-clique, but of 
a nation. He has sat upon the Treasury Bench. 
In the next Liberal Administration he will hold 
Cabinet rank. He is envied, courted, flattered. 
The wildest ambitions of his boyhood are in course 
of certain fulfilment. But he has lost for ever 
the joy of victory; the springs of happiness are 
for ever closed by the one overwhelming defeat 
of his life. 

He is on the best of terms with Aloysius 
Gleam, and attends his wife’s dinner-parties. 
Between them the past has only once been referred 
to, and that silently. It was the first time he 
found himself alone with her, one evening after 
dinner, Gleam having been summoned from the 
drawing-room. Their eyes met for an embarrass- 
ing moment. Then Goddard drew the familiar 
letter from his pocket-book, held it out for a few 
seconds so as to catch her eye, and threw it into the 
fire. She watched it blaze, and gave two or three 
little nods of acknowledgment. Then, being in 
a comfortable chair, a bewitching costume, and a 
considerably relieved frame of mind, she allowed 


THE CONCL USION OF THE WHOLE MA TTER I 5 5 

the moisture to gather in her eyes. But neither 
spoke until Gleam returned with a sprightly say- 
ing on his lips. He threw himself into a chair. 

“ An old servant has just been to return me a 
sovereign she once stole. It weighed on her 
conscience. I asked her about a certain diamond 
pin. She looked haggard, and fled incontinently. 
Verily, all is for the funniest in this funniest of 
all possible worlds. ” 

Bhodanthe broke into her silvery laugh. God- 
dard joined in grimly and looked at her. Bor 
desire of her he had committed murder. He was 
laughing and jesting with her husband and her- 
self. Gleam was right. It was the most humorous 
of worlds. 

Then his mind went back to the terrible 
moment of his life, and his heart gave a great 
heave, and his lips moved noiselessly. 

“ God, forgive me ! ” 


THE END. 









